


occluding junction (and other incidences of biology)

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: ALL THE FRIENDSHIPS, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Fluff and Angst, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Humor, Hunk's Cooking, Keith as Aid to Diplomacy, Pidge is a Very Fierce Thing, Protective Shiro (Voltron), Space Battles, also space war, and other possibly disproportionate reactions, ceiling vent Keith, extensive use of BLIPtech, food is a metaphor for something but the something may in fact be food, i made up these alien planets it was fun, rated G but includes incidental swearing that isn't quiznak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-11 13:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8981479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Keith's solution to his steadily escalating problem is to hide it and hope it goes away. So instead of noticing what's the matter with Keith, everyone notices the steady escalation of his hiding. It's only marginally an improvement. (It's not an improvement at all.)





	1. A Series of Breakfasts

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas! Or, if that's not your jam, Happy End Of The Solar Year! Io Saturnalia! &c! I guess this is effectively a sort of extra present for SirGawainofCamelot, who strategically encouraged me in this incredibly unwise use of time. Also known as ‘the fic where I take some Galra!Keith tropes to their logical conclusion.’ The result wound up less funny than originally envisioned. But hey! I wrote some Voltron! Before the new season came out even.
> 
> I guess this is set in either an AU where they got away without being scattered at the end of season 1, or a season 2 where they got back together and on the Castle quickly and with minimal drama, hahaha.
> 
> (Edit: Oh wait lol that's pretty much what actually happened who'd've guessed.)

It started with a change of gloves. Which was why nobody noticed at first.

It had probably actually started earlier, with a paranoia about the ends of sleeves and the hems of shirts, but that was subtle and body-shyness wasn’t all that noticeable away from communal showers, which everyone had done their best to avoid back at the Garrison anyway, though no one as well as Pidge. The first _visible_ sign of what was to come was that Keith had gone through the perfectly preserved ancient stockpiles of Altean clothing and found himself a pair of gloves with fingers.

He’d worn them for a day before anyone noticed; it was Shiro, and he didn’t comment. “Did something happen to your gloves?” Pidge asked at dinner a few hours later. Keith twitched, and pulled his hand back from reaching for another ladleful of seasoned glop like he’d been caught doing something wrong. And yes, wearing full gloves at dinner qualified as weird, but it was comfortable Keith (and Coran) levels of weird.

“Yeah,” he said. Went back for the ladle again.

“I’m sure there’s a pair in your usual style somewhere in the Castle!” Coran exclaimed. Favored Keith with a dramatic wink. “It was considered fashionable in my grandfather’s day.”

Lance got so much entertainment out of that revelation that Keith’s toneless, “I like these,” passed unaddressed.

And really, there was nothing to address. The gloves were black and thin enough not to get in the way on any but the most delicate tasks, which Keith wasn’t in the habit of performing, and like most Altean clothing they fitted perfectly. Why shouldn’t Keith like them? People were allowed to make changes to their looks. Pidge hadn’t cut her hair since they got to space. (Actually neither had Keith or Lance, though Lance was totally going to get around to it any day, _seriously_ , what are you Hunk my _mom?_ )

It was several more days (and one and a half battles, and one Voltron) before the next thing, which was a turtleneck shirt. Hunk actually noticed this one first, by about two minutes, but only because Lance didn’t actually look at Keith that morning until he was done with his first cup of Space Not-Coffee. It wouldn’t have been so noticeable a change on some people, but black fabric all the way up to the top of Keith's throat stuck out against the white frame of his jacket’s high collar. Shiro noticed third, followed by Coran, who assumed he’d noticed the similarity in collar design between his jacket and Paladin armor and decided to emphasize it with a similar underlayer. Allura took until lunch. Pidge had to have it pointed out.

That was a little weird too, but still not a big deal.

 _Everyone_ noticed the hat. It was a tight little skullcap deal, that he wore pulled down most of the way to his eyebrows so it made the wild curls of his hair hug the back of his neck and bunch up over the parts of his ears it didn’t cover, and looked more than a little ridiculous.

They noticed even more two days later, when Keith had either _cut his hair_ or stuffed it into the hat, and pulled a sort of Altean hoodie on over the turtleneck, but under his jacket. The hood was very resolutely up. Over top of the hat.

“Dude, how emo can you get?” Lance asked after a second. Keith frowned at him, shrugged, and sat down.

“Uh, you were supposed to argue there,” Lance pointed out, while Hunk solicitously offered their tardy red teammate the dish of fried space roots that he’d gotten almost like homefries. “Are you admitting that your new wardrobe choices are a reflection of the dark and melancholy abyss that is your soul?”

“No,” Keith rolled his eyes, dishing up a smallish portion of tubers and handing the rest back to Hunk, who willingly took seconds before making Keith accept the last spoonful. “I told you, I’m just feeling chilly lately.”

The discussion that followed came close to being an argument, with Keith insisting he wasn’t sick and he wasn’t going space-crazy, and absolutely refusing to get a medical check-up. He’d turned down that suggestion after the hat, too, but the suggestions were more emphatic this time and so was his refusal.

Shiro or Allura could have made it an order, but both of them looked at the way his shoulders hunched inside his red jacket like he thought someone was going to try to force him out of it, and decided independently not to try. Shiro was perhaps motivated a bit more by sympathy and Allura more by the knowledge that she shouldn’t threaten her own authority by giving orders that weren’t directly related to Voltron, or inarguably necessary, or ones that might not be followed, but they were both alert to both considerations. (They had both gone to the bridge after the meal at which the hat first appeared and used the castle's internal Biothermal Life Indicator Point technology for the somewhat nonstandard purpose of confirming that Keith’s temperature was normal, which was the only reason Shiro had let it go the first time. It was just a hat, after all.

Coran had offered to turn up the heating, but Keith said that wouldn’t be fair to everyone else. He’d given in on having it raised just in just his cabin, though.)

“How do you even _bend your arms,_ ” Lance persisted in the present.

“I can bend them enough to beat _you,_ ” Keith shot back, and then somehow wound up accepting a challenge to prove it. (Pidge had egged the situation on, not that Lance generally needed much help convincing Keith to be stupid.) They finished breakfast and decamped to the training deck, for once in their off-duty clothes.

Keith actually couldn’t bend his arms as much as he was used to. He very nearly lost, and Shiro lectured him for half an hour afterward about giving his teammate a bloody nose with his forehead and what was and was not fair play in spars, which Keith took stoically. At the end of that, the Black Paladin put one hand (the human one) on Keith’s shoulder and said, “Listen. There’s obviously something wrong. I’m not going to insist that you tell me, not yet. But I want you to know that you _can._ I’ll help. You don’t have to handle this alone. We’re a team.”

He saw Keith—lean toward the words. And then shut down. “There’s nothing to handle, Shiro. I’m fine. Sorry for making Lance bleed.” He cracked a rather sickly smile. “Maybe he’ll be ready for it next time a Galra he thinks he has pinned tries to headbutt him, though.” He’d winced a little from Shiro’s unimpressed look at this defense, and left.

Shiro sagged once he was alone. Let himself sink onto the bench that ran up the middle of the locker room. That could have gone better. Maybe he should have skipped the lecture. Or just—asked Keith to confide _first_ , and then lectured if he said no. They put you through a battery of thought-exercises for situations like this when you were training for team commander at the Garrison, but Shiro hadn’t been through that training. He probably would have, if they’d gotten back from Kerberos alive; they’d have wanted to break up their team and give them each a command, because the space program’s lifeblood was publicity. Though he doubted any of the thought-exercises allowed for managing teenagers over whom you had only a shaky formal claim to command.

Pidge insinuated herself into the room before he had a chance to sink too deeply into self-recrimination. “So, what do you think? Space virus, space leprosy, alien parasite?”

“ _What?_ ”

She shrugged, dropping down on the bench beside him. “Lance thinks he has a parasite, because Hunk convinced him even Keith wouldn’t keep a virus secret when it might be catching, which is good because there was some shrieking before that. _I_ think it’s a skin condition.”

“You don’t think he might just be _cold?_ ” Shiro asked, even though he didn’t believe that either. Even if Keith were a good liar, he’d looked obviously overheated at the start of Shiro’s lecture, and still made no move to even take down his hood. At _best_ , Keith suddenly felt unsafe surrounded by his fellow Paladins, and felt the need for extra emotional armor even alone with Shiro. For no obvious reason. He shook his head. “Please don’t gossip about your teammates behind their backs.”

“I wouldn’t if he weren’t obviously hiding something.”

Shiro gave her a look. She looked away, not quite blushing. “I wasn’t _this_ obvious about it!” she said, even though whatever Keith was hiding, no one had become truly suspicious until today, let alone figured it out. “Anyway, I was hoping he’d told you at least. It got better when I told, and I was just lying. He might be sick.”

Shiro shook his head. “I don’t think Keith has confided in anyone so far.” To be fair, neither had Pidge—Shiro had just had inside information about the existence of Katie Holt.

She pulled one knee up to tuck under her chin, and managed to almost not look vulnerable doing it. It was the hard look behind her eyes, probably, which made it clear that she intended to fuck up anything that threatened her team, up to and including space leprosy. “We’ll figure it out.”

“We will.”

-

It was hardly the first time someone had missed breakfast—Keith was more likely to do it because he didn’t want to leave the training deck to eat than because he’d slept in, but both reasons were possible.

When he finally turned up, just in time for training, he was wearing a mask.

It was smooth and white and covered his whole face, even his forehead over the hat, and he would have looked hilarious if he hadn’t looked kind of creepy. “What?” he asked, somewhere between nonchalant and waspish, when everyone stopped what they were doing (in Lance and Pidge’s case, chatting; in Shiro’s case pushups, and in Hunk’s bicep curls with weird alien barbells that were actually shaped like bells) to stare.

“So is your _face_ cold now?” Hunk asked.

“No, I just felt like wearing a mask.” There was a pause, while everyone waited for him to follow up that sarcastic barb with some actual explanation, even a fake one, and then realized that that was it. “Let’s get started.”

Glances were exchanged, and Allura’s eyebrows were especially furrowed because Keith’s increased layering had been less noticeably odd from an alien perspective, but Shiro gave a nod, and she nodded back. They were going to let it pass. For a little longer, at least.

The first part of training for today was almost more teambuilding; Allura was leading them in discussions of hypothetical battles to help them brainstorm tactical solutions ahead of time—even if none of the plans they made now were ever directly applicable to real situations, it was good practice and would make them more flexible in the field. They sat in the curved couches in the rec room for the discussion, a sort of round table without the table, and Keith still managed to lurk in the background while Allura presided from the head of the table.

Coran arrived halfway through and drew attention back to Keith’s appearance by identifying the mask as one that had been worn in an onboard production of _Young Love In the Season of Precipitating Stones_ a few years before the war. If he thought it was peculiar for the Red Paladin to be wearing it, he didn’t say anything.

They split up to change into their armor for physical training, and Lance groaned out loud when they met up again and Keith turned out to have _kept his mask on_ under the helmet. “Really, Keith? _Really?_ ”

“Lance,” Shiro reproved.

“Yeah, yeah.”

To Keith’s credit, it took almost six minutes of the team versus a quintet of gladiator-bots to become obvious that he no longer had any peripheral vision whatsoever. Or maybe that wasn’t to his credit, since that was partly because everyone was _used_ to him becoming hyperfocused on what was directly in front of him to the exclusion of good judgment.

Still, when it took Pidge shouting “ _Keith!_ ” in exasperation to get him to notice that Hunk and Lance were down with Shiro covering them and she was cornered by a pair, and had been trying to maneuver nearer him so they could cover each other’s backs for a very long thirty seconds already, it was suggestive of more than his usual tunnel vision, which had been getting a lot better until today.

He drove his opponent back in an upward-surging power move that bought him enough time to turn his whole head toward the Green Paladin to see what she wanted, then fell back immediately toward her. His robot lunged after him, and he was forced to cross the distance in a sort of whirling sidestep to avoid giving any of the three hostiles his back for too long. Pidge butted the curve of her helmet against his scapula as she slipped into position, and at least his ability to tell enemy from ally had advanced by leaps and bounds since the early days because he knew it was her at once.

“Let’s make for the wall,” Pidge suggested, and Keith made a wordless sound of agreement. Their progress in that direction was slow—three enemies was enough to completely surround them and make it necessary to fight for every inch.

Pidge swore as she blocked a blow to Keith’s side he should have seen coming. Her weapon wasn’t intended for extended close-range engagements, and while having Keith at her back was definitely an improvement in some ways, it cut down on her freedom to dodge and he wasn’t pulling his own weight as much as he usually did. “Pay attention!” she snapped. If she could get a little over a second of not having to block, she could deliver a powerful enough taser burst to shut a robot down, but there was never enough time.

“I _am._ ” Keith sliced the arm off one of the bots—possibly the one he’d been dueling earlier, they were identical and it was easy to lose track—and drove his blade into its center of mass to send it to the ground, inactive.

“ _Ngh,_ ” Pidge grunted, overextending herself to deflect another attack from Keith’s left flank. Luckily he looked around at the sound in time to lunge straight over her head and protect _her_ from the blow she’d left herself open to in protecting him, and the Green Paladin ducked through that space and brought her dagger into what would be the robot’s gut if it were human, fizzing with electricity.

It went down sparking, just in time for Keith to get bludgeoned to the ground by yet another attack he should have seen coming, and become for purposes of the exercise ‘unconscious.’

Shiro finished off his two opponents in time to help Pidge catch the last enemy in a pincer, and then the all-clear tone sounded for simulation end. The downed Paladins sat up again.

“ _Rrrgh!_ ” Pidge said, and flung her helmet to the ground in frustration, before Shiro could offer his usual commentary or Coran interject any from the control room. “We’re better than this!”

“Hey,” Lance objected, hurt.

“Not you,” she snapped. “I mean, yes you, are better, but anyone can get knocked out early and melee doesn’t favor your bayards, you’re fine, I’m talking to _Keith._ ”

Keith’s shoulders hunched a little. Normally they would have been able to tell how he felt about that—Keith wasn’t particularly communicative but he had fairly expressive features once you learned to look—but behind the mask he looked almost unfazed by his teammate’s wrath.

“That was some really excellent teamwork we just did,” she informed him angrily. “Apart from the fact that I had to protect you from _anything coming from the side_.”

“Sorry,” said Keith.

“I don’t want you to be sorry,” she said, “I want you to stop being a problem.” And then she flung herself at him and yanked off his helmet.

They went down in a muddle of limbs, Keith giving a startled cry as the red helmet went flying (and turning out to still have the hood on underneath). Lance gaped, Hunk clearly tried not to think it was funny, and Shiro waded in to intervene. “This stopped being funny when you turned out to be putting whatever-it-is over,” Pidge was saying as she snatched at Keith’s disguise, only to be cut off when she worked her fingers under the edge of the mask.

Keith shouted “no!” with a note in his voice that was a little closer to real fear than anyone would have thought to expect, and it became very obvious his previous struggles had been limited to just trying to keep himself from being stripped when his elbow shot neatly back into Pidge’s gut and he all but _threw_ her several feet away, where she hit Shiro’s legs and lay momentarily stunned, struggling to get her breath back.

Keith stumbled to his feet, his breath also ragged even though he hadn’t had his diaphragm paralyzed.

“What the _quiznak_ ,” said Lance.

“I—sorry,” said Keith, and then all but fled the training deck.

He didn’t turn up for lunch, which no one was very surprised about, or dinner, which still wasn’t surprising but was worthy of worry, since it made three meals in a row. Everyone lingered at the table after they were done eating, but the conversation wasn’t nearly as bright and rapid as usual when this happened.

“So…who’s going to check on Keith?” Hunk finally asked.

“Not it,” said Lance at once.

Allura covered a smile. “I doubt anyone wanted you to do it, Lance.”

“Yeah, if we decide we want to dare him to come out and face the music, you’re our guy,” said Hunk. He looked around the table, as if some of the food he’d cooked had actually survived the meal by hiding under the edge of a bowl or something. “I’ll…fix him a bowl of goo.”

-

Shiro knocked on Keith’s door. “Hello?” He knocked some more. “Keith?” And some more. It had been well over a minute. Keith was not a heavy sleeper; if the door hadn’t been locked he would probably already have given into temptation and let himself in just to make sure his teammate wasn’t slipping into a coma or something. For now, he kept knocking. “Keith, my knuckles are artificial, they aren’t going to get sore; I can keep this up indefinitely.”

Unfortunately, Keith was also capable of waiting out an annoying noise indefinitely, and Shiro was adult enough to be aware that in a battle of aggravation no one was actually the winner.

“Keith, I know you’re in there.” Nothing. “Allura found your life-signs on the castle map. Keith, in about twelve ticks I’m having Coran unlock this door.”

“Don’t.” Well, at least he was talking. “I’m fine.”

“Your core temperature is almost four degrees above normal.”

“Okay, I’m not completely fine.” His voice sounded rough, like he was parched, or like he’d been screaming. They all had running water in their attached bathrooms, so Shiro didn’t have to worry that Keith was going to die of dehydration due to cutting off his own access to water, but that didn’t mean he was hydrating enough to stay healthy. Also, even sick people needed to eat to keep their strength up.

“I’ve brought you some food…goo,” he volunteered, shifting the bowl in his left hand. Hunk had made his ‘oatmeal version,’ when Allura broke the news about Keith’s fever, stirred in two different sweeteners and topped it with little pieces of dried fruit.

“…thanks.”

“Are you going to let me in?”

“Just leave it. Uh, please.”

“Are you drinking enough water?”

“Shiro. I’m _okay._ ”

What Shiro really wanted to do was break the door down and drag Keith to the healing pods to fix whatever was wrong. There was now actual evidence that he was physically unwell. He could be _dying_ and was he planning to just…crawl off to den up alone and lick his wounds until he either got better or died? People had done that in the slave cells, he thought he remembered. Winners and some losers—especially of fights he’d been in—who’d come back injured and weren’t valuable enough to patch up. They would claim a corner and huddle, trying to make it through to healing. If they were lucky, somebody carried them food and water and got it into them when they were too weak to do it themselves. There was an Osset that Shiro helped through the fever from a bad gash to his stomach, and he fought so hard and got better just in time for them to send him out into the ring again as soon as he could walk. He didn’t come back. Shiro—

He broke his way out of the memories. Braced his forearm against the door, and swallowed. “Keith, please let me in.”

There must have been something in his voice that gave away his stress, because Keith only took a few ticks to go, “hang on.” There was the usual light sound of Keith getting up—no terrifying foot-dragging of the nearly dead, at least—and then after a few more ticks passed he said, “Okay.”

Shiro tried the door again, and this time it unsealed. He let himself in, holding up the bowl of goo like a passport. “See? Food.” Keith was, disconcertingly, a featureless heap of blankets. He’d found himself extras of those somewhere, which was more than a little odd considering it really was noticeably warmer in here than out in the hall. He was _sitting up_ in bed under the blankets, his head bowed to bring it even with his shoulders. His hair was a mess, it showed even through the fabric. Had he been brushing out the tangles from under that hood at _all_?

“Thanks.” Keith’s gloved hand slid out from under the edge of the blanket, and Shiro came a little further into the room to put the bowl into it. Keith accepted it, but reached up to set it on the shelf at the head of his bunk.

These rooms were so unwelcoming, Shiro reflected unhappily. Narrow little things with oddly pitched walls, in a huge empty castle. He didn’t usually notice, let alone mind; it wasn’t like he used his for anything but sleep and exercising when he should be asleep, it was only thinking about Keith shutting himself up in here— But they were conveniently placed, so there was that.

Unexpectedly, once Keith’s hand was empty again it groped for Shiro’s. He offered his left and was glad he had when Keith just—gripped it. It might not matter much to Keith which hand he got, but then again it might, and Shiro could feel a lot more through his real hand. The grip was firm, and Keith might have a fever but at least the glove wasn’t clammy with sweat. “I’m okay,” Keith said from under his blanket. “I just—need some time? A little more time.”

“Take the time you need to get better,” Shiro said, even though they couldn’t necessarily afford that, even though the universe might need them urgently at any time, needed them urgently all the time. Keith never cut himself any slack; if he said he _needed_ something then Shiro would do his best to give it to him.

Keith sort of laughed at that, the little ‘ffh’ sound that was all you generally got from him. “I’ll figure this out,” he promised. Tightened his hand a tick, then let go.

“If there’s anything else you need besides time,” Shiro said.

“I’ll—let you know.” This promise was much more halfhearted and awkward, and probably reflected Keith’s usual definition of ‘need,’ i.e. ‘I will literally die otherwise,’ but at least he’d made it.

Shiro nodded, realized Keith couldn’t see it, felt stupid. “I’ll just—head out so you can eat your goo,” he said, when he realized that eating under the covers would suck, so standing here was pressuring Keith to take the blankets off his head if he wanted his dinner.

“Thanks,” said Keith. He probably didn’t mean for leaving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added 2/1/17: 'My knuckles are artificial, they aren’t going to get sore; I can keep this up indefinitely' is my favorite part of this whole fic. I felt very vindicated when Shiro kicked off season two by making morbid jokes at his own expense.


	2. A Series of Engagements

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the support! :D

Pidge went down the next morning with breakfast. Without the fever, she would have joined Lance aboard the ‘starve him out’ train because like hell was she going to coddle a sulk from one of the Defenders of the Universe, but if he was sick that was different. She tried the door, found it locked, knocked. “Breakfast,” she announced. “Biscuit things and goo that tastes a lot like scrambled eggs.”

No reply, which could of course mean he was asleep. She wasn’t carrying any large tools—she _could_ handle mechanical things but Hunk was better so these days she generally left anything weighing more than five pounds to him—but after a second she pulled out a tiny screwdriver and rapped with the butt of its handle. “Keith. Keith. Keith. You have a duty to Voltron to eat and get better. And not waste Hunk’s nice soft space biscuits. Stupid.”

This felt disquietingly like trying to get Matt up in the mornings, when he’d been a teenager and she’d been tennish. Before he’d moved into the Garrison dorms. But that had been just teenage sleep patterns and the fact that Matt could sleep through a hurricane, not him refusing to come out and look his family in the face. Matt had been a pretty angst-free teenager, on the whole. He took after their dad. Pidge sighed, put her back to the cold metal of the door, and slid down until she was sitting on the floor.

“I’d say I’m not really mad at you,” she told the corridor. “But actually I am. Whatever you’re hiding, it isn’t worth screwing over your friends.” She sighed, and started eating one of his biscuits. “I’m sorry for trying to force you like that, though,” she said, spraying crumbs. “That wasn’t fair.” She didn’t get to be mad at Keith for pulling away from the team when she’d tried to abandon it, maybe, except she’d given up dedicating everything to finding her family _for this team,_ for the universe, and Keith didn’t even have anything to abandon the rest of them _for._ Maybe that was it. “I never thought you’d be the one letting us down.”

She finished the biscuit. “I can’t actually leave until you say something or let me come in and see that you aren’t dying,” she pointed out. “I hope you realize that.”

“…if you just put the food on the floor I’ll grab it later,” Keith said from the other side of the door.

The food was already on the floor, so Pidge got up and left, telling herself she was not going to think about Keith any more for at least twenty-four hours. She had much more important things to distract her.

-

Hunk had figured out he could stretch their grain supply further and make it more vitamin-rich if he mixed it with food goo, which also made it stickier and green. Since the grain was now sticky, he made space onigiri for lunch, with fillings like ‘chopped space pickles’ and ‘those chewy space leaves that taste kind of like bacon.’ It was hard to get meat or fish in space. He explained all of this to Keith’s bedroom door, then left a plate containing one of each kind of green not-rice ball on the floor, along with a small heap of the water-packets they usually drank during training, because getting out of bed to refill your water glass was often prohibitively difficult when ill, and if Keith wasn’t going to let them nursemaid him Hunk could at least make it easier for him to take care of himself.

“Thanks,” said Keith before Hunk left. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Sure I do,” Hunk said. “We’re a team.”

“I’m screwing it up, though.”

“Well we’d all be a lot happier if you’d come get in the sickbay and let Coran figure out what you have and if the pods would help, but if you’re screwing it up by not being okay the rest of the team’s job is to hold it together until you’re better.”

“What if,” Keith said. And then didn’t finish the sentence. “How long do you think it would take Allura to find a new Red Paladin?”

Hunk’s heart plummeted. If he called Coran to unlock the door now, he could probably carry Keith up to sickbay within five minutes. More if Keith put up a fight. “Are you _dying?_ ”

“No! I’m not dying. I’m not that sick even. I’m just.”

“You’re not replaceable, dude. Get better.”

-

Lance brought Keith dinner. He went away fuming and deeply worried, because nothing he’d said seemed to get Keith angry. Or not enough to push back, at least.

But unlike back when Lance had meant nothing to him, he’d sounded _apologetic_.

-

Keith had been living exclusively in his room for a little over two days when Pidge came to Shiro with some information she’d found in the bulk download Allura had gotten from some smugglers, in the attempt to get the Castle’s databases a little more up-to-date. “Look, combined with what I got from the ships that tried to take us in that ambush leaving Reetlou, these coordinates are clearly where the Galra send most of the prisoners they pick up in that whole quadrant. Even if Matt isn’t there, Dad probably is. _Shiro,_ ” she pushed. He was staring at her wrist-computer’s projection field. “Are you listening?”

“I’m listening. This—this looks good, Pidge. It really does.”

“Wha— _really?_ ”

“Yeah. I don’t have your head for databases, but I think you’re right. There’s a better than even chance Sam was sent to this Camilan.”

“So we can go check it out?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Her breath rushed out in a whoosh, enough that she almost overbalanced, and Shiro steadied her with his Galra hand on her shoulder. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

She adjusted her glasses, embarrassed. “I—guess I was afraid you’d say we couldn’t waste time running around after leads, or that this wasn’t a sure enough thing.”

“Because I asked you to stay with Voltron instead of dedicating all your time to your family…”

Pidge looked down. The light of her wrist-computer glinted off her glasses and turned them opaque. “It was stupid. I know you care.”

Shiro leaned a little closer, so the outer edge of his arm brushed against her shoulder. “I do,” he affirmed. Hesitated. “They’re still my crew, Katie. My friends.” He waited for Pidge to look up at him; she gave a small nod. Shiro smiled, and stood back. “Let’s go see what Allura thinks.”

-

Allura was perfectly willing to take the Castle to the mining world in question and stage a jailbreak. “Even if we cannot find Pidge’s family, this seems a good candidate for Voltron’s aid.”

“Keith’s still sick, though,” Hunk pointed out.

Pidge rolled her eyes. “It’s a _mining colony,_ Hunk. Not strategically vital like the Balmera, either. Just your basic metallic ores. Tin and cadmium, mostly. The castle’s fully functional. We can do this with four lions.”

“Why do we spend so much time liberating mines, anyway?” Lance wondered aloud.

“Mining is a heavy industry the Galra have never bothered to automate,” Pidge answered what was probably intended as a rhetorical question. And considering that the ratio of Galra troops to Sentries in the average crew complement suggested they had largely automated _warfare_ , this was saying something. “Which means miners in the Empire tend to be forced labor, which means they’re some of the most clear-cut victims of Zarkon’s regime. A lot of the people here could be political prisoners.”

“It makes a good starting place,” confirmed Allura. “The Voltron Alliance needs to be built on a foundation of trust, and rescuing people gives them a reason to trust us.”

Lance nodded. “Oh. So like Spartacus getting the farm slaves to join his rebellion.” He scratched his chin, considering. “Are we planning on needing an army at some point? What,” he added defensively, when everyone stared at him. “We _all_ took history, it was mandatory, Spartacus is epic cool. Right Hunk?”

“Well, yeah,” Hunk agreed. “I was kind of stuck on the army thing, though.”

“It’s a valid question!”

“It is,” Allura acknowledged solemnly. Activated the form of the star-map that filled the bridge, and turned away from the Paladins with hands clasped to survey the universe. “I have no answer. Not yet. We obviously must foment resistance, but an army…. I hate to think of embroiling others in this war, and yet even Voltron cannot win everything alone. Perhaps Altea fell merely because Voltron was incomplete, but…”

“It’s everyone’s war, Princess,” Pidge pointed out. “Because if the Galra haven’t hurt them yet, they’re going to. That’s why _we’re_ involved. Remember?”

“Well spoken, Number Five!” enthused Coran. “Green’s right, Princess. We’re going to have to let others choose their own forms of resistance. It’s then our duty to help them make those forms a success.”

Allura nodded. “That is the way of Altea.” She dismissed the star-map and turned back to the Paladins with a smile. “So, who is Spartacus?”

“I am Spartacus,” Hunk intoned.

Allura blinked. “Really?”

That got a laugh from every human on the bridge—a single large, surprised bell from Shiro, a sort of ‘pffff-fff-ff’ sound from Pidge.

“No, Spartacus is…basically Shiro, actually,” Lance explained.

“He was a gladiator a few thousand years ago on Earth,” Hunk explained better. “Back when gladiators existed. Uh, he broke out and rallied a rebel army of other slaves against the Roman Empire.”

Pidge grinned. “So, like Lance said, Shiro.”

“I don’t _want_ to be Spartacus,” said Shiro uncomfortably.

Lance flung an arm over his shoulders. “Shiro, buddy. My _man._ Listen. We aren’t going to _lose._ ”

Shiro couldn’t help but grin. “Well, when you put it that way.”

Even without losing, though, even without dying alone, his flesh crawled at the idea.

If they were going to raise an army, it should be on the strength of Allura’s family legend. He didn’t want anyone to go to war trusting in the renown he’d earned as the Champion.

-

The native life of Camilan didn’t amount to much more than algae—well, and lichen, which as Sam Holt had always joked was basically just algae that had grown a spine—but it was enough to guarantee breathable atmosphere. Another reason slave labor was more economical than mechanized; they benefited from atmospheric oxygen, rather than oxidizing. The Castle arrived with particle barrier already engaged, all crew but one standing ready on the bridge. They were the only large vessel in view, over the spidery purple-limned shape of the mining base set into the featureless grey landscape.

A small swarm of Galra fighters quickly rose up from the base, but they were gnats harassing a Lion; the Castle particle barrier barely noticed them. They had time for Pidge to link into the poorly-secured local records via the rotationally synced communications satellite they’d parked beside and discover that no, there had been no prisoners even remotely likely to be her family transferred here in the past eighteen Earth months—there were a couple that fit other parameters before that, but that was before the Kerberos mission had been attacked.

Shiro—tangentially assisted by Hunk and Allura and either helped or sabotaged by probably-tactical-distraction antics from Lance and Coran—was trying to calm her back from the brink of some really dire emotional outburst when the Castle sent up an alarm: Enemy vessel spotted. Ticks later, two dozen Galran warships slid out from their hiding places—four behind the planet’s moon, and twenty more on the far side of the star. These had been better hidden, but were also further away, giving the Paladins precious minutes to plan and get into position. The ambush a little over a week ago had driven home to everyone that without being Voltron, Galra warships were slightly tougher than they seemed when a Lion could, technically, wipe one out in a single long blast of plasma. The trick was landing that blast when everyone was trying to shoot you and you had to keep track of everything that was getting shot, not just yourself.

The good news was that they were engaging considerably farther from the surface of Camilan than they had been from the Balmera or Reetlou, and that most of that surface was acceptable collateral damage in a way neither the living planet-creature nor an inhabited world would have been.

On the bridge of the Castle of Lions, the Blue Paladin arched his eyebrows at the Green. “Do you _still_ think we can do this with four lions?”

“Lance, stop,” said Shiro, almost more to protect Lance from the consequences of giving Pidge a target at the moment than because that had veered close to the unproductive infighting he usually got up to with Keith. “We definitely can, and even if we couldn’t it would be too late to back out now.”

Lance looked from Shiro to Pidge and seemed to realize how much he shouldn’t give the latter a hard time right now. “Yeah, okay. Four lions, six ships each. Easy-peasy.”

Hunk crammed his helmet on. “Let’s do this.”

As everyone stepped toward their respective hangar-access elevators, the main door to the bridge slid open. “You don’t have to do anything with just four lions,” said the new arrival, already armored up.

His helmet was in full, enclosed vacuum mode, and he’d somehow persuaded the visor to go dark. It looked like the darkened ‘training helmet’ mode Coran had used to blind them, but presumably he could still see, even if they couldn’t see him. “Keith?” asked Hunk.

“You have a _fever,_ ” Shiro reproved, making use of the only actual fact he had on hand. “Go back to bed.”

“I’m not that sick,” Keith replied. To prove it, he dropped forward and did a handstand, which actually did seem to go if anything better than usual. He stayed upside-down for five seconds without trembling or wavering, then dropped back onto his feet. “See? I’m good to fly.”

“If he says he’s fine, he’s fine,” said Pidge.

“I don’t know,” said Hunk. “I mean, he’s been skipping _training._ ” Which, since it was Keith, said a lot about how bad he had to feel.

“We can handle _one battle_ without you, Mr. Garrison Hotshot,” Lance scoffed. “Take ten, sheesh.”

Keith folded his arms. “I’m not sitting out of a fight.”

“We cannot afford to be down a Paladin,” said Allura firmly. “Keith, we _especially_ cannot afford to be down one permanently, so I want you to take no risks.”

“Fine. Hang back,” Shiro ordered. “Focus on taking out anything that gets near the Castle, and engage only in emergency or if we need to form Voltron. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

Restraint and caution weren’t exactly the Red Paladin’s strong points. “You’re sure?”

Keith huffed. “ _Yes._ Let’s go,” he said. His tone invited exactly no discussion.

That wouldn’t have put his teammates off, because after three days of worrying their patience was at an end, but the impending battle did, and they scattered to their posts.

Out in space, the Voltron Lions formed a defensive line between the Castle and the enemy vessels, which had fallen into a sort of attack crescent.

“That fourth one’s not a warship,” Keith pointed out. “The big one, there.”

“He’s right,” Pidge said tightly. “Galra ship classifications come up a lot in the stuff I’ve been hacking; I recognize the profile. It’s not; it’s armed but the cannons are minimal. It’s _cargo._ ”

“People-cargo?” asked Hunk.

“All kinds.”

“You guys thinking what I’m thinking?” Lance asked. “I mean, ship good for carrying things, people who can’t exactly live on Planet Cadmium and Algae forever…”

“If we can take that ship whole it will be a great resource for the prisoners,” Shiro confirmed. “Allura?”

“That is an excellent plan,” Allura confirmed from the bridge. With less enthusiasm, as though she were holding the words at arm’s length in case of unfortunate side effects, she added in fairness, “Well done, Lance.”

“All part of the special Blue Paladin Lance service.”

Ignoring that, as everyone had learned to, Shiro determined, “Since it’s not a major threat, we won’t make it a priority target, but if you get a chance to do minor engine damage to keep it in place, take it.”

Pidge leaned forward in the Green Lion’s cockpit. “Roger that.”

“Otherwise, let’s do this as fast as we can. Keith, remember you’re defending.”

“I _know_.”

And he did stay still, while the rest of them dove forward, effectively still four. Galra fighters poured toward the Castle quickly enough, though, and he had plenty to do. The Green Lion dove in roaring in the Red Lion’s usual pattern, then jinked abruptly sideways, dove through the line, twisted, stretched its jaws wide, and shot a precise plasma bolt into the aft of the cargo vessel. “Let’s see you hyperaccelerate with _that_ piece missing!” its pilot gloated, and then had to dive sharply into the midst of a small cloud of fighters as one of the warships opened fire on her and almost hit her broadside.

Hunk ploughed his Lion into that ship headfirst, leaving a massive dent in the area of the bridge, which effectively got their attention off of the Green Lion. “ _Oh_ yeah!” Lance called out. “You and me, Hunk, let’s take this one first!”

Lance’s ice breath attack worked weirdly well in space; Pidge complained about not knowing where he was getting the water. Or she had before; today she was totally, almost disturbingly on-task. She ripped the fighters efficiently apart, taking only around half a dozen hits in the process, and launched herself toward the remaining knot of warships no one was fighting yet.

“Pidge,” Shiro summoned her back. “Support me.” For a moment it looked like she was going to disregard the command, but then she brought her Lion about and slid in, bracketing his target, one of the larger ones equipped with a heavier than average front-mounted cannon, probably intended for ships like the Castle—probably not the Castle specifically, because after the raid on Central Command, if Zarkon had _known_ they were going to be here there would be _so many_ more ships.

Or maybe those guns _were_ intended for the Castle, and he had ambushes hidden beside every prison-world within five sectors of Earth.

If so, Hunk hoped it was because Zarkon thought Shiro wanted to rescue his friends, and hadn’t found out about Pidge. The number of really bad scenarios that went with the Galra Emperor knowing he had two prisoners the Green Paladin would walk through fire for was enough to made him shiver even behind the controls of the Yellow Lion, and he shook that off and threw himself into protecting his hasty best friend from assault by Galra. “Up, Lance, look _up!_ ”

“There _is_ no ‘up’ in space!”

“Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding my stomach of that! Anyway there _is_ , right now, we’re in orbit. The planet is down.”

“Doesn’t count if I can’t feel the gravity.”

“Actually I’ve been looking at the Lion’s stabilizer system and I’m pretty sure as long as we’re inside them we wouldn’t have to feel the gravity on a planet’s _surface_ if we didn’t want to. It’s sort of like— _down!_ ”

“Great, now I wanna thank some random Galra drone for saving me from an engineering lecture during a firefight.” Lance fired again, putting the lie to his sentence by destroying the ship he’d just dodged. “Also I totally had that.”

“Both of you tone it down,” said Shiro. “Focus.”

“Yes Dad,” Lance muttered.

“I heard that.”

Even when not being drowned out by Hunk and Lance, Pidge and Shiro’s communications were much more to the point. Between the might of the Black Lion and the guile of the Green, the whole line of gunships went down in bursts of flame without landing a hit on a major strategic target, just before the legs of Voltron finished shattering their ten opponents, some scattered as shards after the Blue Lion’s breath turned their metal glass-brittle, others collapsing more sedately in a buckling of hull plates.

Shiro’s call to stop Pidge from engaging the last five ships solo had probably been for the best, because the group had spent the time since then closing with the castle-ship, and while the Red Lion seemed to be performing as normal, Keith (whose Lion was better suited than Pidge’s for head-to-head conflict with warships) had only managed to hold off all five alone because the Castle was sparing power from shields to return fire, a delicate balance when at least a hundred fighters were keeping up a heavy rate of fire from all angles.

Allura’s directions to Keith had kept the other Paladins updated on that part of the battle, along with his more-laconic-than-usual replies. Keith didn’t always feel the need to speak at all, making him a little quiet compared to the other Paladins, and he didn’t ramble, but he didn’t normally sound like he was hoarding words against some future vocabulary famine, either.

“Shiro,” Allura said, now that the other fights were over. “Clear out the fighters so the Castle can afford less shielding. If we can divert enough power to blasters, we can clear the field far more quickly than even all five lions together.”

Since everyone had seen the size of the Castle’s maximum laser during the fight above the Balmera, no one argued with that claim, and while Hunk slipped in to help Keith work protection, the other three set to clearing away the triangle-winged upright diamonds of Galra fighters.

It wasn’t exactly a mop-up mission; the fighters were fragile compared to the heavy warships but they were harder to hit and harder to dodge, and they were hardly lightly armed. Still, the Paladins were good enough by now and their Lions strong enough that even this number were at this point more a dangerous nuisance than the serious threat the remaining warships still posed.

Then it was over, the last warship cracked open like an egg stuffed with nitroglygerin, and the cargo vessel still hanging dead in the void.

“Alright!”

“Woohoo!”

“Nice,” said Keith, sounding like he was smiling for the first time in days.

“Great job, team. Okay, the crew complement for the cargo vessel should only come to about four, assuming this isn’t a trap, but we’ll need to clear the Sentinels out too before the prisoners can use it.”

“Yeah, they don’t hack well,” Pidge admitted.

“Who’s coming in with me? Keith, not you, you’re still sick.”

“I’m _fine,_ ” Keith insisted, but didn’t try to join the boarding party.

“I’m in,” said Pidge. She was still riding the edge of fury and mourning that her highest hope yet had been dashed, and wanted something to sink her teeth into. The twenty-minute space battle had just taken the edge off.

“Not me,” said Hunk. “I’m landing.” Mostly as a favor to his poor stomach. And also because in the admittedly-not-that-likely event that the cargo ship was stuffed with person-sized enemies banking on their getting out of their Lions for exactly this reason, he wanted to be outside to get his team out safely.

“I guess, if you’ll be lost without me…” Lance drawled.

That was, of course, when ten more warships popped out of hyperspeed into the space beside Camilan’s diminutive moon. Someone had gotten a call off.

Some of the new enemy vessels were the same class as the ones they’d just destroyed, but two were larger, long heavy-bellied things with the kind of massive ion canons even Voltron couldn’t afford to risk being hit by. Battlecruisers not that dissimilar in design to the one they had faced at the Balmera.

The enemy reinforcement slid into an orbit that left the Lions between the canon and the planet. The specific part of the planet holding barracks full of prisoner-miners, who even if they did not include Pidge’s family were theirs to _protect._

“Oh man, I knew we shouldn’t have started cheering so fast,” Hunk groaned.

“That’s eight dreadnoughts and two battle cruisers,” announced Pidge.

Lance said, “Okay, okay okay let’s all stop flapping our quiznaks and figure out a plan.”

The Red Paladin shook his head behind his blackened visor. “That’s _still_ not how you use that word. But yeah. A plan sounds good.”

“We can do the same thing we just did,” said the Green Paladin grimly.  

The Blue puffed out a breath. “Uh, not to be a downer Pidge, but…I’m pretty sure I can’t.”

“Yeah, I’m worn out,” Hunk admitted. “Not that I’m not gonna try! Just. I’ve only got so much in me per day. Also Yellow’s armor needs patching up in…a couple spots.” Green looked noticeably battered, too, and even Black had been slower by the end of the fight than at the start. And their sick Paladin hadn’t actually gotten much of a break at all from being placed as rearguard.

“And we won’t be able to spare much if any power from shields for another blast,” said Allura.

“Afraid not!” Coran affirmed. “Especially not as long as those cruisers and their cannons are still hanging about posing a threat.”

“Guys,” said Shiro levelly. “We need to form Voltron.”

Voltron came slower than they were used to, anymore. “Come on, come _on_ ,” Hunk found himself chanting, which was a bad sign; the kind of pure focused purpose that the formation asked for usually precluded worry.

Shiro gritted his teeth. “Almost…there….”

And then it all fell apart. It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar feeling—Pidge’s hesitation over her secrets and discomfort in committing to the team had felt a little bit the same, back near the beginning; in a different way so had the moment when Zarkon tore the heart out of Voltron when he hijacked the Black Lion—but also not. Maybe the difference was just in the person, because of course this time it was _Keith_ pulling away from the rest of them. Pulling so far away they couldn’t hold together.

“I—I’m sorry, guys,” came his voice over the comm. “I didn’t mean to do that. Let’s try again.”

“No time for that,” said Shiro roughly, not angry but without time for gentleness. “Here it comes. Scatter!”

The lions leapt apart, each dodging the purple streams of two ion cannons as best they could. “Whoah whoah whoah!” Hunk in his Lion not meant for dodging hollered, tail barely whisking free of the leading edge. One beam drilled into the crust below, hopefully not intersecting any currently occupied mining tunnels, and the other sent up a massive plume of steam from the silver ocean.

“Hah!” exclaimed Keith. “You couldn’t hit a moon if you were parked on it! Red Paladin here, yes. In the Red Lion you’re trying to shoot. As if you _could_ hit me, you sad excuses for ambulatory fungus. Come on, try it! That was pathetic. I’m generous, I’ll give you another shot. Hah!”

Over the course of this speech he and Red narrowly dodged three rushed, low-powered bursts from the larger cannon, and two from the smaller, some of which missed the planet behind him entirely, which suggested that Keith had actually opened a channel to the Galra ships and gotten the attention of someone with the power to make decisions. (Someone who probably shouldn’t have the power to make decisions, even ignoring that they were an evil Galra oppressor of the universe.)

“Is Keith taunting a cannon right now?” Hunk asked.

“He sounds like Lance,” observed Pidge.

“Learned from the best,” said the Blue Paladin. “I’m so proud.”

“Let’s not waste it,” said Shiro. “Hunk, hang back. Lance, cover me. Pidge, ghost.”

If they couldn’t be Voltron, the next best thing was teamwork.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fight scenes are hard. Fight scenes where you need to research what is possible in-setting and the results don't compute are just unfair. The power leap the Lions took between episode 8 and episode 11 is a mystery, though definitely largely attributable to the tactical difference between needing to defend the terrain, versus being happy to utterly wreck everything in the vicinity that is not one another. Including the bad guy's...forcefield-projecting Dyson rings, holy starfire btw.
> 
> ^^ On rewatching Voltron to check details, noted with delight just how much cliche scifi jargon they use without any attempt to explain or excuse any of it. Particularly like Allura going 'divert all power to blasters!' (I threw in a bunch of water-ship terminology in the same spirit. 'Battle cruiser' is canon per Allura, everything else was me.)


	3. A Series of Assays

Pidge slid out of sight behind the moon as Hunk fell back to take the place Keith had been assigned, blocking the way to the Castle. The Blue Lion flipped its tail up, gaped its jaws, and started up an impressive rate of fire, picking off fighters and damaging dreadnoughts as Black dove forward, coming in toward the distracted cruiser faster than the heavy cannon could reorient toward her even if it tried, let alone build up significant charge. The smaller warships peppered them; Shiro dodged some and asked Black to absorb the rest in the interests of speed. She would tell him if her armor wasn’t up to the task.

It was.

Then they were against the hull, and popped their jaw-blades and raked a deep slash through the armor plating with those and their claws as they slid along to the heavy cannon. Keith’s taunting had stopped being effective at some point in the last five seconds, the easily provoked officer having either rediscovered self-control or been overridden, and the gun was now warming up to a heavy charge and pointing itself straight down, the Galra apparently determined to blast their own base off the map rather than give Voltron the satisfaction of liberating it.

Shiro tore the thing apart until the glow died, just as behind him the Green Lion dropped camouflage, opened her jaws, and seared through the smallest warship’s belly, where she had ripped a hole in the armor plating with her claws, all unseen.

One ship over, Keith had flung himself at the smaller ion cannon, roaring it to slag. “Shiro!” Lance called from behind him, and the Black Lion pulled back in time for the two of them to slice through to the engines and turn the largest threat on the field into a harmless fireball. Shiro checked on his Paladins. Lance and Hunk seemed to have their assignments under control.

“Keith, hold your position, I’m coming over to back you up. Pidge, get back under cover.” Every time she used her cloaking device the enemy would be more on guard for it the next time, but as long as no one got away from this battle that would have no long-term strategic impact. And it gave her a reason to disengage and not let herself be surrounded.

She grumbled, but obeyed, vanishing in the eclipse of the Castle this time instead of the moon. Hunk kept any of the enemy from following her, most impressively by throwing Yellow into one ship so violently it yawed, its blaster scythed its way across the bows of two other Galra vessels before they shut it off, and when Green slipped invisibly back over the top of the fortress-ship no purple beams shot her way.

They could do this. They were tired, but they _were_ doing this.

Keith remained in the thick of the fighting, though Shiro might have hovered a little more than usual. Toward the end of the battle, the Galra seemed to be trying more to wipe out the mining base than to wound the lions, apparently willing to die making Voltron’s victory pyrrhic if they could not win. Shiro resorted more than once to Hunk’s usual tactic of direct collision, and Pidge and Keith together sliced through the last of these from opposite sides.

“ _Hey_ no!” Hunk shouted. The final dreadnought was trying to escape. “Back me up, guys!”

The five of them together finished off the final opponent almost without effort, the final blast coming from the Blue Lion’s mouth. This time they didn’t cheer, but waited a minute before heaving cautious sighs of relief.

“…okay, team,” Shiro said, when no more enemies appeared. “ _Now_ who’s up for clearing out the transport with me?”

Lance and Pidge let out surprisingly similar groans, and spoke over one another, “Still flying, Captain,” and “You got it.” They needed to have this place evacuated as soon as possible, if not sooner. After all, who knew when there would be _even more_ reinforcements.

“Okay. Hunk, hit the ground. Clear out anything that’s left down there and play diplomat. We’ll catch up as soon as we’ve taken the ship, but call right away if it turns out you need backup. Keith, stand guard. Alert us if there’s any sign of Galra forces. Be ready to help in an emergency, but otherwise I want you to _stay put_ , alright?”

“Yes _sir._ ” Somehow when Keith said things like that they didn’t sound anything but sincere.

“And…great work today, everyone.”

“Thanks Shiro,” Hunk replied, already angling the Yellow Lion down into the atmosphere. “You’re the best too.” Somehow when Hunk said things like that, they sounded like jokes and _also_ perfectly sincere.

-

Allura left the bridge as soon as the shipboard battle was secure and Shiro had begun issuing new post-combat stations, her steps carrying her to the Red Lion’s hangar.

This was not an honorable act. It was an invasion of privacy. Sending the mice to do it for her would not change that, and she had been ashamed of considering sending them into Keith’s room to investigate earlier this quintet. But now Keith’s secret-keeping was threatening all the Paladins and the universe as a whole, had prevented the forming of Voltron, and needed to end. Better to spy on him than force him into submission in a battle of wills. May as well do so in person, and have the option of a private conversation afterward.

Red had already landed by the time she arrived, Shiro having ordered its pilot back to his recuperation, and she crept forward hastily, hoping she was not too late to spot Keith.

Instead of Keith, there was a Galra.

Allura dropped instantly into battle-readiness. There was no sign of any other Galra. This one was small, not even as tall as Allura in her natural form. It had—she raked her eyes up and down—Keith’s bayard at its side, which it wouldn’t be able to use, and no other visible weapon. It was wearing Keith’s armor, and had his helmet in its hands, and suddenly she knew why forming Voltron had been impossible.

Keith had to have been _in_ the lion, though; she wouldn’t have moved otherwise. It had been a long time since a Paladin had been held hostage against their Lion, since long before Allura’s birth, but she’d heard the story. Zarkon would know it even better, though it was before his time as well, and _of course_ he’d set an agent to try. The question remained of how the Galra had gotten into Red in the first place, but that could be addressed later. For now, she had caught it unawares.

The shape of the room allowed her to come very close unobserved, before she rushed the intruder. She gave a shout as she closed, for intimidation, and the Galra leapt back, dropping the helm and reaching for Keith’s bayard. It would probably not be able to use it, but the bayards were less choosy than the Lions, and as a precaution Allura grabbed that wrist first and wrenched the weapon away, just in case it did activate.

With the other hand she grabbed the infiltrator by the throat and flipped it heels over head to slam against the nearest bulkhead, where she let it slide to the floor.

It scrambled to its feet faster than she would have expected, hands raised defensively in some open-palmed combat style that suited its size, and might have served it well against someone of less strength than an Altean. She rode through its guard with sheer power as it tried to speak, gripped it by one shoulder, and drove it back into the wall again.

Killing it would be foolish—it had too much information they needed—but it seemed not to realize that because it _cringed_ when she drew back her fist, as no trained warrior should flinch from pain let alone a Galra. “ _Please,_ ” it gasped. And it was not in Allura’s nature to hurt something that pled for mercy, even her sworn enemy, even when all logic suggested it must be a trick; furthermore it was so _small_ and seemed so young in that moment that she—hesitated.

The Galra took advantage of that moment, twisted itself free somehow from her grip, and—dived into an open ventilation duct.

Wonderful. She’d shown weakness and now they had a Galra spy loose in the aeration system.

But that was a problem to deal with in a moment. More urgent now was their missing Paladin. “Keith!” she called out, running toward the Red Lion. The infiltrator would be stupid to have gotten out of the lion and left Keith behind, because there was no way Red would ever let him back in, but Red had been kneeling with her mouth open when Allura arrived and there had been no sign of Keith, and somehow she expected to find him lying bound in his own cockpit, bleeding and half-conscious.

She never got the chance to look, because she slammed up hard against the Red Lion’s particle barrier. “I am trying to _help!_ ” she very nearly shrieked. Red straightened up, unimpressed, and glared down her nose at Allura. Who punched the barrier in frustration.

Mastered herself. “Very well,” she said. Bent to pick up the fallen helmet and bayard of the Red Paladin. Couldn’t leave them where the Galra might double back for them. “I assume you have enough sense not to keep Keith from urgent medical care. You’re sure?”

Red didn’t respond in any way. Either Keith was not inside his Lion, or he was safest there. Allura accepted the Lion’s judgment and rushed back to the bridge, opening the biothermal life indicator point map without even taking the time to acknowledge Coran’s surprise and concern. Set it to distinguish life-signs by species because the most likely place for the Galra to have stashed Keith was the ventilation system, and she didn’t fancy the delay of having to reset the program _after_ it finished booting to find out which of the life-signs inside the walls was which. Colored dots began winking into being across the Castle schematic.

There were herself and Coran, two Alteans on the bridge. A human in the Green Tower; Pidge who’d been sent home rather than ask her to come be reassuring toward prisoners who weren’t her family and had never laid eyes on them, lingering beside her Lion.

And a Galra in the heximal aeration shaft.

No other life-signs detected.

_No other life-signs detected._

Keith was gone.

Coran’s worried exclamations broke back into her field of awareness after a few stifled ticks. In explanation, she raised her hand to point to the red Galra dot. That was enough, especially when Coran noticed after his initial reaction to the invader that there was only the one human-gold marker.

There were very few ways to have hidden Keith’s energy signature entirely from the Castle, inside the Castle. It was _possible_ , especially considering that the sensors were ten thousand years out of date and no doubt technology had advanced somewhat in that time, even assuming they were in perfect working order, but it was much more likely that he was a prisoner elsewhere, and the Red Lion compelled to fly without him by some druidic magic.

Or that he was dead.

Common sense suggested he was probably dead.

Unless.

She looked down at the helmet in her hand, the bayard she’d shoved inside of it. The Galra had looked at home in the paladin armor. It had reached for the bayard so naturally—and yes, the sword was the preferred weapon of the Galra officer even today, but there had been no groping with an unfamiliar hilt or placement, although most weapons were sheathed higher on the hip than Keith’s bayard.

The misery in its yellow eyes, and the way it had fled without even seeming to consider striking at her. Alteans were strong, and Allura was highly trained even for a member of her vanished race, and had executed an effective initial assault, but she hardly cut so intimidating a figure that she expected her enemies to flee rather than face her. It was reasonably likely that Zarkon held his espionage corps to different standards than his public credo of victory or death, but it still didn’t feel right.

Perhaps because this Galra had been different from the soldiers she had grown used to seeing, small and lone and afraid and unmasked, had looked up at her with the eyes of a _person_ , like the Galra she had known long ago—before the war, before the Fall of Altea or the Last Stand at Rhindonu. Before time had become something she measured in ‘before’s _._ Or perhaps because, now that she considered carefully, the slope of the nose, slightly upturned at the end, the movement toward the bayard, the distressed pull of the mouth, even the fall of hair around the raised collar of Keith’s paladin armour—they had all been…even more familiar than that.

The Galra basal body temperature was roughly seven Altean heatmarks above the human.

She opened the paladin channel and listened to her own voice, faint and small, echoing back from the crimson-chased helmet in her hand.

“Attention Paladins. There is a Galra on the Castle, hiding inside the walls. It is wearing the Red Paladin’s armour.” She took a small breath. “I believe it may be Keith.”

-

On the surface of Camilan below, the Black Paladin abruptly dropped the cup he was holding—only water, but given in friendship, and much welcome after the long fight—and the Blue suddenly stood up stock-straight and shouted _“WHAT?!”_ into the face of a very startled elderly miner.

Despite the drama of the announcement, the Paladins of Voltron could not drop everything immediately to grapple with it. Allura kept an eye on the red life-signature while Coran busily checked various vital Castle systems and hull segments for signs of sabotage. He found nothing, and since their mystery Galra proceeded not to go near anything vital, Allura asked Hunk, Lance, and Shiro to finish their planning with the newly freed miners before returning—ordinarily she would have joined them rather than calling them back, as the main diplomatic face of Voltron, but there was a difference between refusing to panic and pretending this was not a moment of crisis.

Pidge, the only Paladin on the Castle, was difficult to restrain from diving into the vent system in immediate pursuit. If it was Keith, there was no great urgency and he should be given time to recover from his panic, and if it wasn’t then she should wait until she had more backup. She did see sense eventually, if only because Allura had neither the time nor the willingness to convey constant updates on the location of the Galra biosignature, and her wrist computer wasn’t up to running the program.

“That _was_ Keith out there with us,” she explained angrily. “He made _in-jokes._ We almost formed Voltron, I _felt_ him. He wasn’t under duress, even, because he’s shit at pretending to be in a better mood than he actually is. Which means if they’ve _taken him_ he isn’t very far _away_ yet and _every second counts._ ”

This was an excellent argument, but Allura had one in return. “If Keith was with you in the battle,” she said, “then if he is alive, he is still on the Castle.”

“But the sensors aren’t picking him up.”

“Unless he is the Galra.” In which case, no immediate rush.

“If they might not be picking up a live human Keith in the Castle, then they could have missed someone leaving with him, too.”

Allura regarded the Green Paladin steadily. “And so?”

Going into the vents would be useful only if it proved beyond doubt that their intruder was not the rightful Red Paladin _and_ provided a hint as to his location, which was unlikely. Especially compared to the odds of either getting Pidge killed in the one case or harassing Keith pointlessly in the other. (Or if Pidge stumbled upon living human Keith in urgent need of medical care, but the more time passed the more Allura was certain the Galra she had surprised had had Keith's face and build, and who would bother to falsify that and not his coloring?)

As impetuous as any Red Paladin but no fool, Pidge subsided, grumbling.

“Get some rest,” Allura suggested.

“I can’t rest, I’ll _think!_ ” Pidge snapped, and huffed her way to her workspace to go over the Castle’s recent sensor logs looking for anything that could be a departing vessel for Keith to have been kidnapped in, and fiddle with her technology and try to convince it to accept a data stream from the Castle computers so the bridge could do the heavy work and her wrist unit would just have to display the resulting image.

Allura did know the feeling—it was hard enough mourning her father and her world; while she would have traded places with Pidge in a heartbeat she had to admit that being in suspense as to their fate would have been more _distracting_ than knowing they were gone. Being in suspense with regard to Keith was unpleasant enough as it was. But the evacuation of the mines was on a far stricter timeline, and even if Keith had in fact been kidnapped he would know his duty as a Paladin of Voltron was to endure until the innocent were safe. She went back to her own work.

When the other Paladins did come back, it was late in the Castle’s day and the middle of Camilan’s night. “I am bushed,” Lance announced. “What’s this about Keith now?”

“I think we should look for clues,” said Hunk, because none of them actually needed an overview.

It was agreed.

Hunk and Lance’s search of Keith’s room turned up nothing in the way of personal items—his original fingerless gloves and v-necked shirt were there, along with the theater mask, but his belt with its storage pouches and knife-sheath must be wherever he was, or maybe in his Lion. No one was getting in _there_ soon.

There was purple hair in the bed and bathroom. “Oh, bring some with you,” Allura directed when they reported this. “We can test its genetic structure with one of the devices in sickbay.”

Pidge, listening in from the Red Lion’s hangar where she and Shiro had found the rest of Keith’s clothes in a pile with nothing in the pockets, reached up under her helmet visor to push her glasses up her nose. “Hair doesn’t actually have genes,” she corrected. “See if you can find one with the follicle attached.”

“Of course hair has genes,” Allura responded, baffled.

“See, that’s a common misconception,” began Hunk, “no, wait, you’re aliens, maybe not?”

The next few minutes of airtime were filled with explanations to Allura and Coran that no, human hair was not exactly a living part of their bodies, and explanations to the humans that yes, Altean hair _was_ , and mutual attempts not to say outright how gross that was. “Okay,” said Lance, having picked up some of the hairs from the bed and made Hunk check the sink for ones with skin cells attached at the top, “but what about Galra hair? Because Keith or not, I’m pretty sure that’s what we’ve got here.”

“Excellent question! I believe it serves some function as antennae, for those that have it,” Coran explained. “Not very sensitive, but good for picking up air currents from behind you. Like an Epswinger beast!”

“It should have genetic material,” Allura supplied.

“Okay, so we’ve collected some headwhiskers,” Hunk said, palming Keith’s door open to let himself out. “What are we testing them for? Can we test it for Keith-ness? Do we have any known pieces of Keith?”

It was rapidly determined that they did not in fact have any confirmed Keith samples, so Hunk was given all the purple hair to carry up to sickbay while Lance was assigned to search for black hairs to compare them to—though since it had been over six days since Keith started hiding his hair, if he _had_ been slowly transforming into a Galra under that hoodie the castle’s cleaning systems had probably had more than enough time to destroy any older shedding. Also human hair didn’t have any DNA.

They didn’t find any, anyway.

The results of the analysis were not overwhelmingly helpful. “Well, it didn’t say he’s definitely Galra,” Coran announced to the gathered Paladins, with an absent moustache tug. Now that Lance knew the moustache (and Allura’s hair) were alive and could sense touch, that gesture was so much weirder.

“So the computer says the hair is ‘probably from a Galra?’” Lance asked. “That is maybe the least helpful thing I have ever had a computer say, and I used to have one of those word processors with the little dancing cartoon that kept guessing what you were trying to write and telling you how to do it better.”

“What we have is an ambiguous reading," said Allura. "If we had used a blood sample, it might mean we had accidentally given it a mixture of blood from two or more people. Since this is hair, it could mean the sample comes from someone with some Galra ancestors. Or someone who is being forcibly transformed into a Galra. Or a Galra who _had_ been transformed into something else, and is changing back.”

“Transf—that’s a thing? How is that a thing?” Lance was looking around to check his confusion against the others’; on this occasion he wasn’t alone.

“It’s astounding what Galran druids are capable of,” Coran said almost grimly.

“We’ve seen the Robeasts,” Shiro pointed out, and that cast a pall over the whole room. 

“Keith did fight a Druid, didn’t he,” Hunk said. “On the secret base. Right before Allura got captured.”

“Not to mention,” Allura added unhappily, “that the Red Lion was the only one that spent long in Galra custody.” She didn’t know _how_ long; the previous Red Paladin had still been alive when her father sent her into suspended animation on Arus. Neither Allura or Coran knew how she had died. ( _If_ she had died, she supposed she should say; Zarkon was still alive after all.)

Pidge’s eyes narrowed on the genetic analyzer. “Can’t your machine be any more precise? That isn’t much better than we could do on Earth.”

“The machine is not the problem,” replied Allura. “Neither of us is a trained medical technologist, which limits how well we can use the specialized equipment in sickbay.”

Pidge cracked her knuckles, gaze narrowed even further. “Let me at it,” she said.

They only had one. Permission to dismantle denied. Coran _did_ locate some associated documentation in the computer banks, and Pidge settled down with it like she’d been given a mountain of enemy transmissions to decode.

He then spirited Lance and Hunk off to spend a while ferrying ex-prisoners up to the recently captured Galra freighter to start repairs, the most fragile in the copilot’s seat of his pod and the rest in small groups, clustered in the cockpits of the blue and yellow lions the way all five Paladins once had on their original trip to Arus. Shortly after that ended, Coran got on comms from the bridge to report that a large number of sealed packets of food goo, intended as field rations, had vanished from ready storage, as had an even larger number of the hydration packs.

“A lot?” asked Hunk, who’d been about to go out again and start salvaging the ships he’d crushed in hopes of ready engine parts for their rescue ship. Coran’s stockpile was surprisingly applicable after ten thousand years, but Galra parts would still go together faster.

“Enough to keep a human Keith’s size going for half a movement if he stretched it! Less for a Galra. Maybe two quintets.”

Hunk put on his helmet, as if for something to do with his hands, then pulled it off again. “Okay, so…there’s a probably-Galra in the walls with supplies for…I’m just gonna call it ‘over a week,’ it’s _probably_ Keith, and if it’s not Keith then the _real_ Keith is _hopefully_ out there somewhere counting on us to rescue him. That about cover it?”

It did.

“I’m going in after him,” the Green Paladin announced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s probably a good thing Shiro dropped his water, odds are it had unsafe levels of cadmium. Also hi here are some random headcanons about the aliens in this show and their hair because Galra are weird and Alteans are shapeshifters. Also I hate when people get DNA from hair in TV shows so I had to include a riff on it. ^^


	4. A Series of Contingences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …I broke off the last chapter at what in retrospect looks like a kind of random point, so now the flow in this one seems a little weird? Oh well, I’m posting quickly, the chapter breaks don’t matter that much! Also this chapter is now relatively long.
> 
> (Also the chapter title is not a typo, contingence is different from contingency.)

“Is that a good idea?” asked Hunk.

“I have to do _something!_ ” Pidge’s fight with the medical device had not gone especially well, and her attempts to contribute to the cargo ship’s refit without actually leaving the Castle had been worse—not in the sense of catastrophic, but in the sense that enough of the ex-prisoners had relevant technical skills that she wasn’t _needed_. “Anyway, I fit in the vents better than he does. My size will give me an advantage, for once.”

“Be careful,” said Shiro. Permission and admonition in one, and the other Paladins looked at his drawn face and fell quiet. Allura supposed this was part of why he had kept largely silent since returning to the Castle; he couldn’t keep the depth of his pain and concern out of his voice, and he would hardly wish the younger Paladins under his command to have to shoulder the burden of his emotions when already coping with their own.

Thank all Altea’s ghosts for Shiro, Allura thought as Pidge climbed grimly into the ductwork. She’d come to depend on him, she’d realized during that ill-fated mission that had ended in her capture—it wasn’t strange that such a gentle man should be fit to lead Voltron, for in that he was like her father, and like many other warriors of Altea, but at first it had taken her aback, sometimes, the way he curled inward around parts of himself that were not gentle, as though he thought he might hurt them. Shiro was easier to understand than the younger humans, and yet he _puzzled_ her. A man in some ways even younger than herself, whose default state seemed to be vaguely abashed, yet who still drew together an iron core of certainty when he was needed. He was nothing like Zarkon, and every inch the Black Paladin, and they were so very fortunate to have him. There was more than one reason she had chosen to protect him over herself, when the choice arose.

She would have sacrificed herself for any of the Paladins in a similar circumstance—it was a simple calculation; Voltron was the hope of the universe and she was only its keeper, not one of its five parts, and breaking her would be of little use to Zarkon except as amusement—and it had been her decision that had placed them in a position to be trapped so it had been her responsibility, but letting Shiro most of all fall back into the hands of the Galra had been unendurable, even though he was the oldest of the Paladins and should have needed the least protection. He had endured so much already.

If Keith turned out to be a traitor, or dead…Allura feared for Shiro most of all.

Pidge called in every ten human minutes with a report of nothing but vents. Possibly-Keith was turning out to be a master of evasion, even with her advantage of map-guidance, and she suspected that this was not his first time in the ductwork. The Castle’s crew did their best to go about their lives in the meantime, Hunk now out in space digging into some of the technical challenges left in the wake of the liberation of Camilan, Allura discussing logistics with the elected leaders of the newly freed prisoners. Some of them had homes to go back to; most did not, and there were four different suggested destinations to flee toward, and only the one ship.

“ _Yes_ , we put it to a vote,” said a four-armed yellow engineer. “But no one got a clear majority, and even then we can’t afford to do the most popular thing if it will kill us all.” Allura had been trained for command, but democracy was a diplomatic challenge that required a delicate attention. She was getting a headache, but it wasn't the miners' fault.

Lance attempted a nap, but judging by the way he kept commenting on Pidge’s updates, failed miserably. Shiro was on standby with his Lion in case of further enemy incursion, doing more of his endless pushups as if trying to get his other arm as powerful as his prosthetic. But all of them kept their helmets on (or Keith’s helmet beside her). Only Coran seemed willing to be separated from a constant stream of news.

“If you find out a way for me to help and I’m out of contact, I’m sure one of you will tell me,” he announced, and went off to help Hunk and the rescuees with the repairs. (He then interjected twice as much as anyone else during the brief stretches he spent on-comms flying parts back and forth in his pod, as if making up for lost time.)

“Okay,” Pidge said, fourteen check-ins after she began. “Finally something to report. I’m in one of the wide places where a bunch of ducts branch apart, about…halfway up the Red Tower. I found a pillow and a stash of food and water. Not all of it, but I think this is his main—nest.”

“Man, what is he, a rat?” asked Lance.

“Should I—take the stuff? He’ll have to come out to resupply sooner if I clear out his stash.”

“That seems…really not nice,” said Hunk, the Yellow Lion momentarily paused halfway between the debris field and the moon where the prisoners had parked the cargo vessel for refurbishment. “Like, I know Keith is either being crazy or replaced by a Galra, but I don’t think stealing his food is a good direction to take this.”

“He stole it first,” pointed out Lance.

“Actually, since all of you Paladins have a right to the Castle supplies, you could argue he didn’t,” Coran chimed in from somewhere in space.

“Okay, I’m _not_ taking his food,” announced Pidge. “Or his _pillow_ , good grief Keith. This has to be Keith, guys, who else would stick a pillow in a corner and call it a bed. Besides Shiro.”

“Hey.” The objection was more bemused than aggrieved, and everyone listening to the comms breathed a little easier to hear it.

There was a whisper of metal as she backed out of the confluence and into the narrower ducts again. “I wish I’d brought a camera I could plant here, we could spy on him in his sleep.”

“He’ll probably move his nest once he realizes you’ve been there,” said Shiro.

“Well then we’d get to spy on him figuring that out. I just want to get a behavioral baseline here.”

“Too bad the Garrison doesn’t teach, like, xenopsychology courses,” joked Hunk.

“Man, I would _so_ have signed up for that,” said Lance. “How to get along with sweet alien chicks 101.”

Pidge snorted. “Considering the Garrison didn’t even _believe_ in aliens, that course would probably have made you even worse.”

“Yeah, good point—hang on, hey!”

Hunk laughed. “She got you, buddy. Don’t fight it.”

When Pidge finally climbed out of the vents again in disgust, they all convened in the kitchen where she’d emerged for a council of war that also became a listless goo-dinner when Hunk realized how hungry he was. They’d had a very light lunch because going into battle with a full stomach was dumb, and normally dinner would have been over an hour ago.

Technically today merited a victory dinner composed of real food, but no one had been willing to take the time to cook even if anyone else had been enthusiastic about the idea of eating, so they dutifully spooned up unimproved food substitute standing up around the kitchen island, tossing ideas back and forth.

“We may have to wait until Keith emerges on his own,” Allura concluded.

“Well he needs to hurry up about it.” With that, Lance vaulted up on the counter and stuck his head into the ceiling vent Pidge had left open. “ _HEY YOU JERK! GET OUT HERE ALREADY AND EXPLAIN YOURSELF! I—_ mmph.” The _mmph_ was because Allura had pulled him out of the vent by his collar.

“I don’t think that’ll help, Lance,” said Shiro, and Lance sagged a little as Allura set him back on the floor and went back to her food.

“I guess not,” he admitted. “But we have to get him out somehow, and he’s evaded Gunderson so far.”

Hunk drummed his fingers on the counter. “Maybe if I make his favorite food and put it where the smell will get into the vents, he’ll be drawn to it?”

“Do we know his favorite food?” Pidge asked.

“Uh—no.” Hunk deflated. “He eats everything I make like he’s in some kind of eating contest. Which is very flattering! But.”

“I say we smoke ‘im out,” said Lance. “Like a cockroach.”

Allura swallowed an unladylike large mouthful of goo so she could ask, “A what?”

“Roaches are these horrible bugs that live in some people’s walls back on Earth,” explained Pidge. “They’re almost impossible to kill, but one of the ways that works best is to seal off a building and pump it full of poison gas. Even roaches have to breathe.”

“Ah, it’s like hunting Umberblash!” declared Coran, twirling his moustache thoughtfully. “Actually, it should be possible to seal off a section of the aeration complex and flood it with any of a variety of inhalable substances. I’ll have to investigate that system more closely.”

“We _have_ a variety of inhalable substances?” asked Lance.

“Oh, certainly. There’s—”

“Enough!” Allura burst out. When she had everyone’s silent attention, she continued, “Enough of this. We will not hunt our comrade down like vermin. There will be no threats, or bait, or poison. I drove Keith into hiding with violence, and we must recover him with friendship. He will come out of his own will once he understands we will not hurt him.”

Hunk raised a hand. “Uh, not to disagree with your princessness, but that seems an awful lot like a continuation of the ‘wait and see’ plan we were using back when Keith was walking around wearing a theater mask. And then hiding in his room.”

Allura shrugged. “It wasn’t a terrible plan. Until I ruined it.”

“Princess,” Coran said, concerned.

“But the thing is, it kind of _was_ a terrible plan?” said Lance. “Like, if he’d actually been dying of a terrible disease, or spying for the Galra, or whatever.”

“No, Allura’s right,” said Shiro. “We’ll trust Keith until he trusts us. That’s the plan.”

“Does this mean you want me to stay out of the vents now?” asked Pidge.

After some discussion it was determined that Pidge could go in the vents _sometimes,_ if she made sure to verbally announce that her intentions toward the vent-dweller were non-hostile.

Lance was deeply unimpressed with the way they were handling this whole thing. “He’s being selfish! And dumb! We have a _Galra tracking device,_ just go in and make him stop.”

“Oh like that’s so easy,” Pidge groused.

Hunk sighed. “Buddy. Remember that time when we had a test the next day and you decided to stay up all night eating contraband gummy sharks?”

“Yeah, so?”

“We shared a bedroom, I knew _where_ you were. How did _making_ you go to bed turn out?”

“You didn’t even try. You thought I was funny!”

“I thought you were funny until about midnight.”

Lance huffed in offended frustration. “So, what, you’re saying pushing him is just going to make him more stubborn? This isn’t a stupid math test, Hunk, this is life and death.”

“I know that, Keith knows that, we all know that. But maybe that just makes it more stressful?”

Lance snorted. “Oh sure, he picks _now_ to grow a sense of self-preservation? Please.”

“Finish your dinner and go to bed, Lance,” said Shiro, sounding tired enough himself that nobody even felt much urge to crack a joke about what a dad thing that had been to say. “We’re waiting Keith out.”

Pidge pushed her glasses up her nose, looking unsatisfied but resigned to it. “Operation Feral Feline is go.”

“…can we please make up our minds what kind of animal he is?”

-

There wasn't a lot of time for sleep until they got the prisoners safely off Camilan, with two emergency beacons just in case they needed to summon Voltron. (And a promise to destroy them if they seemed likely to fall into Galra hands.) As soon as the castle and the refurbished cargo vessel (now bristling with weapons) had parted ways, Allura dropped them into an uninhabited system outside Galra space to rest.

Once the first day of recuperation had passed without catastrophe, Coran gathered his toolkit again and headed to the hangar at the heart of the Red Tower. Set his things down, stretched his back out, and stood with his hands propped on his hips, looking up at the inhabitant.

Someone who knew the Lions of Voltron less well might have said it was only a trick of the light that the Red one seemed to be snarling at him.

“None of that now, m’girl,” he said. She knew, of course, that his first loyalties lay with his princess. And, assuming this situation was not an uncharacteristically drawn-out Galran strategy, Allura had hurt Keith.

“You took a real beating out there the other day! If there’s an emergency your Paladin is going to need you in good condition.” He held up his clockwise arrhythmic thaumospanner. “Really now, what help do you think you can be to Keith by sulking your way out of repairs?”

Red still looked scornful, but the fixed hexagons of her particle barrier flickered out of being, and Coran thanked her absently and got to work.

He’d expected the hostility, and it was another point of confirmation that his Princess had (understandably) mistaken the Red Paladin for an infiltrator.

The Lions were loyal to their Paladins, before the House of Altea or any other single person or cause, and though it now meant Voltron could not safely go near Zarkon until his influence over the Black Lion was somehow severed, this had been by design. It would have meant little entrusting a Lion to an ally, after all, if it had been a limited thing, contingent upon the Paladin’s cooperation—nothing more than an extension of royal power through delegation. A means to tyranny, as Zarkon no doubt intended to warp it to be if ever Voltron fell into his hands. The Paladins were more than that, drawn from across the stars to wield the mightiest of weapons, enough to destroy fleets and planets and bring down any threat to peace—but only so long as all five could agree on the rightness of the cause. If all five united against the House of Altea, the assumption had always been, then the monarch was probably doing something worth opposing.

Voltron had always been founded upon trust.

“There’s nothing _wrong_ with having a Galra for a Paladin, really,” Coran told the Red Lion heartily as he pried shrapnel out of her dorsal quintessential circulation complex, knowing she was bound to agree. Even if the Galra had mistreated her while she was in captivity, she clearly hadn’t rejected Keith since his transformation if she was this annoyed with Allura. “Ten thousand years ago it would have been normal!”

He carried on in this vein for a while, falling silent for long periods and starting up again with anecdotes about Galra he had been acquainted with before the war, or entertainingly ridiculous things former Paladins had done, though Coran’s sense of the absurd did not align well with anything anyone from Earth, at least, would recognize. If any audience more verbally inclined than the Red Lion had been present, they might have asked if Coran was trying to convince himself of something.

Two hours on, after the Red Lion’s quintessential systems had been patched and flushed and the initial welds in her armor were setting, he began to speak again, a little less brightly than usual.

“The last Black Paladin betrayed the trust of our good King Alfor, and the Galra became a threat to all that’s good in the universe, but I think I speak for both Allura and myself when I say that nobody thinks he betrayed us _because_ he was Galran. Though, actually I never did find out why! Just one of life’s mysteries.” He shrugged, apparently unaware of just how unreassuring that conclusion would have been to the current Red Paladin, and then grew, momentarily, very grave.

He laid his palm against the red armor and said, in the strangely bald and unaffected manner that came over him only in rare grim moments: “What we always have to remember is, the first planet Zarkon ever conquered was his own.”

Coran stood there a moment longer, before going back to carefully buffing out the scratches on Red’s left foreleg. “I’d be obliged if you could pass your Paladin that message for me, Lady,” he said. “Whoever you really are, and wherever you came from, what you _ought_ to be thinking about, Number Two, is where you’re _going_.”

-

 _Poing._ Lance sprang upright at the metallic note from somewhere above his head, and tipped it back to glower.

“Hey, is that you! You listen up, you stupid… _ceiling cat!_ What’s the big idea? You get so high and mighty about ‘ _we must destroy the Galra Empire at all costs’_ and then something bad happens to you personally and you just flake out? Hey!”

He listened carefully. No further noises. “So what if you’re under an evil curse, huh? Man up and face us! But I guess this is just what you do, huh, when things get tough? Piss off the teachers at the Garrison and go live in the desert, hit Pidge and hide in your room, blah blah, but I’m telling you you’re not gonna find _another_ magic blue lion by pretending to be a really lame Bruce Willis expy! You _listening?_ I’m talking about how it’s easy to talk big about how important it is for _other_ people to make sacrifices when _you_ didn’t have anything to lose!”

“Lance.”

It was Shiro. He was standing in the doorway that gave on the lounge from the clockwise half of the castle, wearing one of those sleeveless black Altean shirts of his so Lance could see the muscles in his folded arms. (The fact that the ones in his right arm were basically decorative didn’t stop them from being imposing.)

“Uhm,” he said. Caught bitching out an empty room. There was probably no way to make this look cool.

“If you’re talking to Keith,” the Black Paladin said, “I just came from checking his location on the BLIP scanner. Unless he’s figured out a way to game the sensors or teleport, he’s hanging out near storage on the other side of the ship.”

Lance felt about two inches tall. “Oh.”

Hunk peered around Shiro’s shoulder. “Venting, huh?” he asked.

Lance didn’t get it for half a second, and then his mouth fell open and he favored his bestie with a long blink before snorting with laughter. “Madre de dios you didn’t. Seriously?”

Shiro rubbed a hand over his mouth like he might be in danger of smiling. “Okay, boys. Lance, I’d like you to try to restrict your…venting…either to actual consensual conversations or to private spaces.”

“Yeah, sure Shiro,” Lance assured him breezily. “Come on, Hunk, let’s go play tic-tac-toe or something while I talk about all the reasons Keith would be a terrible failure as a human being if he was still human.”

Hunk rolled his eyes. “Hangman. I will consent to hangman.”

“Oh come on, you just made a pun out of my angsty rage at being abandoned by my rival, you owe me.”

“That’s why I’m coming at all.”

Lance looked to Shiro for support, not that he had any logical reason to expect Shiro to weigh in on the side of tic-tac-toe, and the Black Paladin raised both hands, palms-out. “Hey, I prefer ‘I Spy,’ but we established on the way to Kerberos that that is a game that doesn’t work in space.”

“Next planet then,” said Hunk, and Lance seconded the promise. This time Shiro couldn’t stop the smile.

It went away faster than Lance liked, though. Stupid Keith. He complained about it the whole time Hunk was beating him at Hangman eight games to one. (What kind of a word was ‘obstreperous?’)

-

Allura found Shiro asleep with his face in the supper table halfway through the dark cycle. Both of them should have been asleep in their beds, but Allura had woken to a scratching in the walls that turned out to be her mice, and been unable to relax again. It dug into her, some nights, that her bedchamber had not changed in ten thousand years, especially since the terrible night when she had had to delete her father’s personality matrix from the ship’s computers, and when the touch of unreality became too thick she would get up and walk the Castle, drinking in both its wholeness and its emptiness, and in both cases its solidity. The reminder that her world and her old life truly were dead and gone beyond recalling and this was no nightmare she could hope to wake from; the reminder that the Castle was solid and the Paladins and Coran alive and with her.

That last reminder was less true and less comforting tonight, so it was rather a relief to stumble over the Black Paladin.

Privately she suspected Shiro spent a majority of most dark cycles awake, but she had rarely caught him outside his assigned quarters. They shared an appreciation for the importance of keeping up appearances.

Still. His ragged edges had begun to show recently. If he had managed sleep, even accidentally, it should be allowed to last as long as it naturally could. Even if that position looked hard on his neck. Presumably it would be harder on a human neck…? They all seemed dreadfully fragile sometimes. Even so.

On tiptoe, she stole out of the dining space and came back with one of the soft cream-colored blankets Hunk had started keeping folded in the lounge, as part of a rather transparent but not ineffective ploy to goad Lance and Pidge into sporadic sofa naps.

Shiro hadn’t moved when she returned. Allura covered a smile even though there was no one to see. His mouth was squashed into a lopsided pout by the surface of the table, and his white crest lay straggling across it. His mechanical hand was still closed around a cup that proved on inspection to be full of nunvil—which was just as nutritious for humans as for Alteans, but for Shiro have chosen it over any of the available varieties of tea he must have been feeling strict with himself. He was wearing his usual day-clothes, so either he had never tried to go to bed or had firmly given up on it, but at least he wasn’t in armour.

Although at least that kept its wearer warm. Carefully, Allura draped the blanket over his shoulders, gently swathing his back and the bare living arm propped across his knees. There. It wasn’t even threatening to slide away.

The hair at the back of his head was so short as to be almost nonexistent—and it was good to know that was a harmless if dreadful stylistic choice he had made himself and could alter at any time; she had previously regarded it as another scar the Galra had inflicted—and Allura felt cold just looking at it. She bent in to tweak the blanket a little higher, but at the whisper of softness at the back of his neck Shiro tensed.

Allura darted backward, out of range in case he woke up defensive. The war had not been newly begun when her father froze her; she knew something of hidden scars, and knew Shiro would take a long time to forgive himself if he struck her, even though she was the best equipped of all their party to avoid taking real hurt from such a wild blow. But he only sat bolt upright, his living hand going to the back of his neck as his gaze shot around the room.

He relaxed as he recognized the texture of blanket, and more once he caught sight of Allura, who circled out of his blind spot rather than wait for him to twist in his chair enough to spot her behind him. “Good evening,” she greeted, embarrassed. Now neither of them was getting any rest.

“Evening.” All sleepiness seemed to have departed, and Allura could have kicked herself.

“I apologize.”

The words came out stiffly formal, the way Allura usually found herself when having to face unpleasant realities, such as her own failures, and she folded her hands against her long skirts (reminder that there was more to her yet than a commander, just as the Paladins who still had clothes from Earth tended to cling to them, and suspecting they had that in common she _should_ have suspected something was awry with Keith) and added, “Truly.”

Shiro paused with his cup halfway to his mouth. Set it down. “Princess,” he said, and she had been called that by most people all her life, so it didn’t make sense how much she suddenly wanted to hear her name.

Keith had never used her name, though all his fellow Paladins had at least occasionally. His natural standoffishness; it hadn’t even stood out enough for her to actively _attribute_ it to his character, she’d certainly never read enmity into it. She didn’t want to have to read it there in retrospect.

“I appreciate the thought behind the blanket, but…I’m starting to think that’s not what you’re sorry for.”

Oh, brilliant. “I also apologize for the Red Paladin’s situation.”

Shiro was frowning. “It’s _not_ your fault that Keith is hiding in the walls.”

This statement was absurd. “He is hiding there _from me._ ”

“No, he _hid_ there from you. At this point it’s gone on long enough I think we can safely say he’s hiding from all of us.” He let out a breath and picked up his cup in both hands, but didn’t drink.

Allura pressed her lips together. She had had no intention of seeking absolution for her error from Shiro—he was not _her_ commanding officer, and it was Keith she had hurt, though any regret she might owe him was somewhat balanced by _his_ responsibility in the situation for not being forthright. But the current state of affairs was wearing on Shiro, who cared about both Keith and the future of this team, and that made his poor condition her fault.

Good judgment was her chief responsibility to Voltron. Otherwise she was merely a source of wormholes to keep the Castle of Lions a useful mobile fortress. “The conclusion you jumped to made sense,” Shiro said. And it _had,_ but the fact that she hadn’t even considered that looking like a Galra would have been a good reason for Keith’s strange behavior—and unlike Shiro, _she_ had grown up in a society where people hiding embarrassing shapeshifting mistakes that had gotten stuck was a real event, even if that was mostly confined to a phase in early adolescence.

“Yes, well,” she said briskly.

Shiro put down his cup. “Allura.” He was going to say something kind and understanding, she could tell, and she didn’t want him to.

“Since we’re both awake,” she said impulsively. “Would you care for a spar?”

Sorrow flashed through his eyes, so quickly she could have missed it—of course, Keith had been his main sparring partner, before this. Then he smiled. “Actually, yes. Thanks. You want to go change?”

Allura shrugged. “We should not rely on having our armour every time we have to fight.”

Shiro raised his eyebrows, but gulped the rest of his cold cup of nunvil, made a disgusted face, and got up. “Lead on.”

They sparred without weapons, which included the superheating abilities of his arm, though of course not the arm itself. He pinned her down by stepping on the hem of her skirt twice, and pulled her freely flowing hair three times. Let it never be said that Takashi Shirogane was not absolutely practical about combat. Allura had been perfectly sincere about needing more practice fighting in her day clothes, so if he was trying to call her bluff it still turned out for the best.

She was almost entirely convinced, though, that he was just—helping her train. The way she’d said she wanted. Because she wanted it. (She supposed she was serving as a substitute for Keith, though she wasn’t sure to what degree. If she had Keith to spar with right now she would probably pull his hair herself. Well. At least she would think about it.)

She still won.

-

Hunk made it a daily ritual to sit with his face almost in the vent that ran by his room and talk to Keith for half an hour. It started out very on-point, but even though he didn’t know if Keith had heard any of it he got tired of repeating himself by the end of the second day, and started to wander. By the end of the quintet he was just telling vent-Keith about his day. It was weirdly soothing, considering he hadn’t really been in the habit of rambling at Keith when he’d actually been showing his face in public.

“So now the big problem is that we don’t know how to decide what we’re going to do next,” he explained on the sixth day. “Like, normally if we couldn’t make other plans because we were down a Paladin we’d be making plans to _rescue_ the Paladin, or counting down ‘til they finished getting better. This is weird. You know?”

“You can make plans.”

“Augh!” Hunk manfully fell off his bed, but rolled upright again as soon as he hit the floor, going, “Keith, man, hey, stay right there, you didn’t run off yet—or, uh, crawl off I guess, you can’t actually run inside the vents I’m pretty sure—anyway, hi! What was that?”

“You guys can plan assuming five lions. If there’s a fight, I’ll fly.”

“Uh. That’s good. I’ll let everyone know. How are you doing in there?”

“But tell Allura not to fake an alert to set a trap for me. I’ll know.”

“You’ll—how much spying on us are you _doing_ in there?”

There was no answer. “Keith? Keith!” Hunk stood up on his bed to force his head into the narrow vent space, but the Red Paladin had already disappeared. “We can’t form Voltron if you never talk to us anymore!” Hunk called after him.

After that, he kept in mind a little more that Keith might actually be listening. All the time. It didn’t really change much since he generally said exactly what he was thinking all the time anyway, but it was a thing. It made him self-conscious. It made him squirm a little when Lance was venting about the Red Paladin situation.

But considering that Lance was rapidly developing a habit of arguing with the ventilation system every time it made any noise at all, in case it was Keith, Hunk decided not to share his new paranoia. God only knew what disjointed idea of Lance’s opinion Keith had picked up by now, if he’d caught any of those rants; no need to make it harder on everyone.

(He had _never_ been so alert to the sounds of a ventilation system before; he’d gone to Coran shortly after Keith’s final disappearing act worried that the Castle was about to fall apart, and gotten an actually very useful hour-long lecture on the rate of metal flexion expected and engineered for in a vessel of this construction. He was much better educated and less concerned about maintenance issues, but still not very good at identifying how likely a given noise was to be Galra Keith.)

-

Pidge didn’t look up from her computer when she heard the noise in the vents. “You know,” she said, not for the first time, “you’re being really stupid.” There was a second creak, which was less common than the vents making noise at all.

Huh. Maybe there was really someone there. Her hands slowed down as she chose her next spoken words more carefully than usual.

“Allura didn’t know it was you. You did figure that out, right? She thought you needed _rescuing_. From yourself. Which is actually kind of true, because _you’re really stupid_. And not just compared to me. You are currently ranked as stupid compared to _Lance._ ”

“ _Hey._ ” Hah, that worked. Keith’s voice, with an extra layer of strain that might be emotional or might mean he was overdoing his water rationing. Or be something Galra about his throat.

Pidge snorted and made a note on her code to mark another place where if she found a more efficient way to implement a do-while loop in this system this was one of the places to go back and plug that in, because the current one was kludgy as hell. “I tell it like it is.” She sighed. “Look. The way this has gone down has been, did I mention, stupid, and a mess, and I’m seriously ticked off with you. But you fought a battle with us the same day Allura caught you with your mask off; you played tag with an ion cannon for us. I think you proved that whatever those Druids did to you, they didn’t change who you are.”

“They didn’t change _anything,_ ” Keith said, soft and bitter in a way Pidge didn’t remember from the halcyon days of two weeks ago before he got weird. It had never seemed like Keith was hiding anything. Keith _couldn’t_ hide anything. Case in point, Keith had worn a theater mask to training and then _moved into the ventilation system_ as methods of hiding his face, which was subterfuge only in a very technical sense.

Pidge hit the Altean equivalent of the compile button—she had the Castle’s programming language almost mastered at this point, and props to Coran’s grandfather there really did seem to be _only one_ in use, across all systems, nice and flexible if not always very efficient—and finally did sit up straight, though she still didn’t look toward the vent where Keith almost definitely wouldn’t be visible.

“Are you saying druids were uninvolved, or that you could come out right now and look just as human as you did on Earth, or that you actually always looked like a Galra and we just didn’t notice?”

“They just. Brought to the surface something that was always there.”

Pidge paused, and then finally twisted around to look at the vent, through which she sure enough could not see any hint of Keith. “…did Coran secretly become a supervillain and infect you with some kind of Altean theater virus or something?”

“…what?”

“I mean, if you were a robot I’d be saying you had your drama dials turned all the way up to eleven.”

“You build your robots with drama dials?” Keith muttered, and he sounded _like him,_ and Pidge swallowed hard. Dammit she _missed_ him. She hadn’t even realized how much. People kept _leaving._ Keith had left without actually going anywhere.

“If I built one to look like a Keith you bet I would,” she said. A beat of silence, and then, “You had _better_ still be there, Red.”

“I’m here,” he muttered, but he was back to that vaguely wretched sound. He used to sound—sort of guarded, she guessed, sometimes, and rarely very happy except when they were flying and things were going well, but everything for him was always about winning. In a _useful_ way, not the stupid one that measured him against the people around him to determine if he was coming out on top or not. A setback wasn’t _allowed_ to be a defeat.

Pidge had always thought they understood each other, even if they disagreed a lot. Keith could get pulled off course by Lance getting on his nerves just like Pidge might get distracted by shiny robots, but they were both goal-oriented processors. Lance and Hunk and Coran and even Shiro and Allura in a lot of ways were process-oriented, and it wasn’t that Pidge didn’t care how she accomplished a thing or enjoy doing it right, but a journey was about the destination. (Lance was endpoint-driven too, she guessed, sort of, but only in an annoying unrealistic way that only popped up when the process was something he didn’t like to think about for whatever reason. Which was kind of her point: _Lance_ was supposed to be the avoidant jackass who wasn’t willing to put in the effort or make any real sacrifices to reach his goals.

Keith was the cold one who would throw too much away too easily, for the sake of his.)

“What do you even want,” she demanded. And she meant in general, because she didn’t really _care_ but his devotion to Voltron’s cause from day one had been intense enough she’d noticed enough to think that he really didn’t have a life on Earth to miss at all and was kind of a loser—but admittedly also in the specific sense of _what is the end goal of your vent-dwelling._

Keith made a little hissing sound through his teeth, and—crawled away. The sound of Paladin jumpsuit sliding against metal couldn’t mean anything else. Pidge had spent enough time in those ducts to know.

“Hey!” Pidge sputtered. “I asked you a question! Come back here!”

She shot to her feet, spun, and stalked over to the workbench against the far wall. That was it. Keith had now officially asked for tiny vent-crawling spy robots. He just didn’t know it yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shiro's haircut actually does seem to be Galra-influenced somehow, since in the capture scene in episode 1 the back of his head looks black rather than grey, but unless his hair _has_ stopped growing for some reason he's apparently maintaining the buzz style on the Castle, so I guess he likes it? Not sure why he's keeping the white forelock so long, though.
> 
> XD Hunk and Lance's friendship seems to largely revolve around making fun of one another, and I have not seen nearly enough saying-kinda-mean-things Hunk in the fandom, so here we have a bit.


	5. A Series of Pressures

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh...edited after about two hours to restore the _majority of the chapter_ that AO3 somehow deleted in the uploading process? The fifty people who read this in the first two hours must have been fairly confused. -_- I am highly embarrassed. (This is what I get for going on a posting binge on Friday the 13th.)

It was only a day and a half later that Allura gave a small gasp and touched a sudden blinking icon on her holo-console. Everyone was on the bridge for what had been going to be a mini-seminar on accessing the Castle’s controls so that people who weren’t Altean or Pidge wouldn’t be helpless in case of emergency, but the Princess was clearly pretty thoroughly distracted.

“Is this—it cannot be… No, it really is. After ten thousand years they still have the code,” she marveled, and raised her head. Her eyes sparkled with excitement. “Malbar calls for aid!”

“And Voltron will answer,” Lance declared.

Allura of course had no idea this was a reference or his solemn tone anything but a moment of sincerity, and smiled. “We will. Malbar was one of Altea’s oldest allies.” Some of the warmth in her face faded and her gaze grew more distant.

“Keith will help,” Hunk reminded her, obviously trying to soothe his own anxiousness just as much as hers. “He promised. You remember I told you that, right? Promised.”

Shiro’s Galra fist tightened.

“And we’re just going to have to hope he keeps it,” answered Lance. A little bitter.

“Is this code different from a distress signal?” Pidge asked, which was a good question since the Castle had gone on picking up distress signals for ten thousand years, and there had been nothing special about the one Rollo and Nyma had used except that it had come from near the Castle in real-time.

“It’s targeted directly at the Castle,” Coran explained. “And encrypted. Zarkon’s had plenty of time to break our old encryptions, but the Galra won’t be easily able to eavesdrop on this!”

“If they have the original communications devices,” continued Allura, “or they preserved enough of the details of how it was made to recreate it, I should also be able to call them back.”

Which meant they could strategize. It also meant they could be lured into a trap. But any time they responded to a cry for help risked that; being able to get more detail probably lessened the risk.

“We may be in battle within the next few hours, depending on the urgency,” Allura announced. “Shiro, I may need your input, but the rest of you should go prepare yourselves.”

“You’ll let us know more over the loudspeakers, right?” asked Hunk, hesitating before leaving the bridge. An affirmative both meant Keith would be brought in and that Hunk didn’t need to keep his helmet on while waiting.

“Once I know anything more to announce,” Allura agreed.

“Voltron will answer,” Lance muttered again, nodding to himself like he was committing that to memory. It had worked out better than his team cheer idea.

“Pff. You know,” Pidge told him in passing on her way to the door, “you’re actually way cooler when you stop trying to pretend you aren’t a dork.”

“Hey!”

-

The Red Lion launched with the rest when they got to Malbar. It was different from any world they’d fought over before—there were cities set into the rolling green plains, of native construction, tall white stone spires and long sloping walls, and decorative causeways that resembled the one that had led up to the Castle entrance on Arus. Galra bases squatted purple-black and foul beside each of them, and the white walls looked worn, as though it had been a long time since any construction or extensive maintenance had been allowed, or maybe just affordable. Malbar was an occupied world, the Galra bleeding it endlessly, taking their taxes in food supply from the once-bountiful fields that had long since been pushed to their limit trying to meet Galra demand. Allura’s contact said the Mallews had risen up fifty times over the last nine thousand years, sometimes successfully for a year or even as long as a decade, but the Galra always came back.

The next time might be the last. Even if they had not had Voltron to potentially ally with and perhaps achieve long-term victory. The crops were declining, the empire was far larger than it had been at the original time of conquest, and Malbar was not the valuable gem in Zarkon’s crown it had once been. The Galra might scorch the earth as an example.

They were rebelling anyway. Because of Voltron.

The Paladins needed to clear the skies. That was their mission. There was a larger than usual Galra garrison on-planet—still mostly Sentries but with a significant living command chain in every base—but without air support the imperial forces were outnumbered enough the people could take them. They’d been stockpiling weapons in expectation for two hundred years. They were _ready_ for this.

The Red Lion launched, but Keith hadn’t joined them in the bridge beforehand, and he’d somehow persuaded Red to turn off the video part of his comm, as though even now he was determined to hide his face from them no matter what. Even though they all knew.

Shiro confirmed he was on comms at least, then did a quick recap of the situation in case Keith hadn’t been eavesdropping on that part.

“We need to take as many of these ships whole as we can,” he concluded. “The Mallews need a defensive fleet once we’re done.” Liberating whole planets was unsustainable as a strategy unless those planets were equipped to hold off subsequent Galra attacks long enough for Voltron to arrive, since they couldn’t be everywhere at once. The more planets joined the Voltron Alliance, the more necessary the army Lance had talked about would become. This was why Shiro still favored targeting supplies and military bases, to preemptively undermine the enemy’s military infrastructure. Stealing pieces of it wasn’t a completely hopeless strategy either, though.

“So, engine crippling,” stated Pidge. “It worked pretty well over Camilan.”

“If it comes down to you or the enemy ship, or to the ship or part of the planet, though, feel free to blow it up.”

“ _Sir,_ ” said Keith.

That was the last thing he said for the next twenty minutes, and the next thing was “Green! On your left!” He and Pidge were on precision assignment, taking Galra craft out with exact laser blasts to the weapons and engines—which were buried deeply and designed to blow when destroyed precisely to _avoid_ this form of piracy, but not a lot of things fought quite like Voltron or its Lions, and Pidge had been studying her schematics, and when she called the shots they almost always crippled without killing.

This meant having to fight additional swarms of drone fighters from the becalmed vessels that would have been destroyed without launching in an explosion, to keep them from getting down to the planet, but while time-consuming this had been judged worthwhile.

Shiro, in the largest Lion, clashed head-to-head with the most aggressive enemy commander in the most dangerous ship, with support from Coran and Allura on the Castle. The thing was twice as big as the axe-shaped battle cruisers, and surrounded by two rings of fighters somehow maintaining one of those barely-visible purple flickering barriers that Zarkon had used to try to trap them in his command system. It was a fight for which, if it had been their sole concern, they would have formed Voltron, but the Lions were needed in more than one place just now, and besides Voltron might not have been possible anyway.

Lance was assigned to strafing the little fighters out of the sky before they could drop too much fire on the people below, because he and Blue had the most precise aim and highest rate of fire even in lion form. Hunk, flying at the same level and also clearing fighters as necessary, was responsible for forcing any large-scale spaceships that came in low away from population centers. He crashed more than one in a field, which wasn’t going to help with the exhausted soil problem but as casualties of war went counted as a win.

“Hey Hunk, I spy a dreadnought on a descent path to point Delta!”

“Can you get it? I’m handling a cruiser over Gamma, I can’t be everywhere.”

“I spy something that isn’t my job, but okay.”

“No, I’ve got it,” chimed in Pidge, dropping hard and fast into city airspace. “You’re on civilian defense, don’t even. It’s a dreadnought and…okay, now it’s a fireball. Do you actually know how to play that game, Lance? Because you were doing it wrong.”

“Huh? What, yeah, of course I know. We promised Shiro we’d play it on the next planet.”

“Not the time, Lance,” Shiro commented. “But thanks for _the thought!_ ” The last two words came out fierce, almost explosive, because in the middle of his sentence the capital ship he was facing fired off another barrage of scientifically crisscrossed blaster streams, and he was suddenly concentrating too hard on flying to even think of canceling the words already on their way to his mouth, let alone modulate their tone. “Whew,” he said, once he and Black made it through the maze of narrow gaps mostly intact, ignoring the way Pidge and Hunk were both laughing at him on comms. “Maybe it should be Keith up here.”

“Do you want me to?”

There was a very brief, but sudden and unmistakeable, silence when he spoke, because he’d been gone from conversation in general just long enough for it to feel strange and momentous when a remark concerning Keith got a response from Keith himself, before Shiro said smoothly, and a little wryly, “No, your assignment is important, stick with it. I’m fine.”

“We’re about done right here,” said Pidge, climbing back out of the atmosphere to rejoin Keith. “Point Epsilon next.”

There were forty-two cities across the surface of Malbar, each with its own Galra occupancy, and they were rising up in staggered order to give the five Paladins time to protect them all, but of course some Galra commander figured it out well before they were done and instead of sending his forces to support the garrisons already under attack, started firing on the locals while the paladins were still a quarter of the way around the world. The Mallews resorted to their older tactic of piling in as close to the Galra as possible, so that either airstrikes became less usable or the enemy commanders were forced to take out their own as well. (It had been a better tactic back when the enemy forces hadn’t been mostly robotic.)

“Red Paladin,” Allura rapped out as soon as notification came in. “You’re the fastest. Get to these coordinates, clear the sky, and _burn the fortification to the ground_.”

“…Princess.” It wasn’t an objection.

“I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

She did, and by the time the Red Lion was done streaking down from heaven at a sharp angle the Mallews had begun to fall back, away from the Galra construction, out into their cratered blackening city where the swarms of fighters crisscrossed one another’s paths overhead as they rained down death. Keith and Red seared through them as if they really were gnats, more dragon than lion, and swept onward.

The Galra base was utterly destroyed.

-

Two of the last four bases surrendered—one under the auspices of its commander, one after a mutiny. “Victory or death,” the leader of the mutiny snarled from behind the hooked fangs of a moray eel, his yellow eyes flashing, “is all very well for those who have no intent of ever _dying._ ”

Zarkon would have them killed for this if he got the chance, but a choice between death now and death later was evidently in some opinions not much choice at all. And perhaps, for the first time in nine millennia of uprisings—Malbar’s recapture seemed less than a certainty.

Allura accepted the Galran officers’ parole, then contacted the Mallewan Generals. “We cannot afford the risk of prisoners within the defenses of the Castle of Lions,” she stated once she had explained. “However, all of the captive Galra can be fit into one of the captured ships, and the Paladins of Voltron can relocate them elsewhere.”

“It’s alright,” said the eldest, High General Stekan, a stooped blue-black being like a shriveled fruit who in her younger days had been a shipping foreman. “We will take charge of them. Hold trials. All you have promised them is life, yes? There are many lesser punishments than death. Especially for those for whom any of Malbar will speak. They were not all awful, you know,” she added, almost kindly. “We have lived with their presence for nine thousand years. We know them well.”

“I am truly sorry,” Allura said, eyes cast down. “That it has taken us so long to help.”

“None of that. When we you heard our cry, you came to us. That is all we could ask. After all, did Malbar save Altea?”

Allura’s composure wavered, and she bowed her head.

Third General Pitapa cleared his throat. “A lesser piece of business brought to my attention: the people of Inistree wish to thank the Paladin of the Red Lion personally for their deliverance.”

“I…am afraid that may not be possible.” All the Paladins had collapsed in exhaustion when the battle _finally_ ended. Shiro and Pidge had taken a long time to leave their cockpits at all, but eventually made it far enough to join Hunk and Lance in melting into the rec room sofas. They’d all eaten Coran’s cooking, when he brought it to them, without a word of complaint.

Keith had vanished back into the vents. No one had ambushed him in his hangar this time. On this world, perhaps, he could have shown himself after all. But she could see why he would prefer not to try. “He is—not well.”

Frowns of concern from all five of the Council. “Was he injured in the battle?” asked Stekan.

“He should make a full recovery,” Allura said, not quite lying. “I will pass on their thanks as soon as it becomes feasible.” It was the same thing she would have said if Keith had been locked in a healing pod.

“And all of our good wishes for his health,” said Second General Artiue.

“Certainly.”

Allura used the general Castle broadcast system that evening to convey the thanks of Inistree, the city Keith had liberated on his own. She kept the message simple and to the point. She did not mention that the city had lost eleven percent of its population before he arrived, because that was her burden and that of Malbar’s Generals. Keith had done his duty. In that he was beyond reproach.

She had sent him, alone, to protect an entire city. She had left him unmolested in the walls for a quintet. All this though he had not shown his face or made any effort to explain himself.

Loyal service excused a multitude of failings, but Allura was running out of patience. (It had never been her strong suit.)

-

They got defensive emplacements in place for the Mallews over the next couple of days, Hunk and Pidge and Allura and Coran busy every minute with drafting plans and pitching in with construction and searching the Castle and debris for the parts needed to get the nineteen captured ships armed and in the air again.

Galra construction tended to favor speed and large-scale weapons, probably because of the size of the empire and because when there was any opposition significant enough to threaten a Galra warship it was usually large, and the favored tactic was to obliterate it directly. The refurbishment sacrificed a lot of that speed for armor and secondary laser banks good for taking out fighter units. The Camilan fleet wouldn’t be able to hold off all of Zarkon’s forces, or be the best backup in attacking other Galra-held worlds, but they should be able to protect their own planet fairly well even if outnumbered.

There was a party at the end of the third day—nothing terribly extravagant, when Malbar had had so much of its wealth drained away, but there were lights and dancing and a ceremony bestowing the charm bracelets the Mallews used in place of medals. Lance enjoyed the admiration so much he didn’t care that the Mallews averaged around seven feet tall with vestigial pedipalps on their jaws, and none of them looked recognizably feminine, let alone gorgeous. Hunk was delighted with the provender.

“Can we just liberate every food planet in the universe?” he asked happily, gobbling a deep-fried breaded foodstuff-of-uncertain-nature on a stick. “Because then we would have all the food, and Zarkon wouldn’t have any, and we’d win.”

Shiro and Allura traded a fairly complicated look that was mostly fondness. “Sounds about right,” said Shiro after a moment. “But I don’t think we can do it alone.”

Hunk shrugged, amenable. He was rarely in favor of doing anything alone.

"The trick," Coran exclaimed, "is coordination!"

"Like Yelmors," interjected Pidge. "I know."

Coran drew himself up, all wounded dignity. "You don't _know_ I was going to say that."

"Yes I do." She swallowed a slice of fruit whole. "How are they even joined together at the ears, anyway? Or do I mean why."

The Mallews had wanted to hold the party until Keith could attend, but Allura confided in the Generals that the Red Paladin disliked public events anyway and they really shouldn’t stay much longer. She accepted his bracelet on his behalf. It had one unique charm, with the insignia of Inistree embossed on it. He _had_ been invited to the event, via Castle loudspeaker. She’d half expected him to turn up with his face hidden behind his mask or darkened helmet, though of course he didn’t have either anymore. She still hadn’t thought of a good way to return his helmet, and…she still wasn’t sure she was ready to return his bayard. Even if he wouldn’t misuse it, he had to come ask if he wanted it back.

-

Pidge released her vent robots the day after they left Malbar. Hunk had helped, without asking what all these little fiddly joints were for; she suspected him of carefully maintaining plausible deniability in case her vent robots made Keith go more crazy and barricade himself in the training deck or something.

There were nine of them, each about the size of one of her hands, not because she thought nine was a particularly appropriate number but because that was how many salvaged processors of the right size she’d had to work with. They hardly measured up to Rover or even Beezer, or any other robot she’d seen in space that had been manufactured as part of a highly developed technical industry, but for handmade piecework by a rushed newbie amateur she thought they were pretty sweet.

They brought no important discoveries at first. The Altean mice turned up in the vents a lot; Pidge wasn’t sure if they were about their own business or Allura had beaten her to running internal surveillance. Keith’s campsite in the Red Tower junction had been abandoned, and the scuttlebots turned up five different tiny stockpiles of supplies throughout the Castle but no sign of the pillow.

Eventually, thirty-nine hours after release, Scuttle2 came face to face with Keith crawling the opposite way. Infra-red vision didn’t record the clearest image of his expression, but the hot patches of open mouth and surface of eyeball grew, and he scrambled backward. The robot kept up with him until he backed straight into a vertical shaft and _dropped_.

Three hours after the fact, reviewing the footage Scuttle2 had logged for her, Pidge made a face. That had _looked_ deliberate, and there’d been no shattered pile of Keith at the bottom of the shaft when Scuttle caught up, so she assumed it was. She wondered what the trick was. Her ‘bots relied on magnetic feet to get down vertical surfaces, and they were electromagnets; she could probably give them fine enough control for a controlled slide so they could descend faster next time. Or she could give them a sort of magnetic grappling gun in the style of her bayard. Which would require more processor tweaks to use right?

She spent the rest of the night upgrading the ‘bots one at a time. Once that was fixed, she guessed she’d dig up some more processors and build more. It was good practice, and eventually she’d have enough to keep an eye on Keith no matter how hard he tried to hide. She ran her fingertips along the top of Scuttle9’s tiny chassis before sending him out again. “Do good work,” she said, before holding him up to the mouth of her bedroom vent.

And now it was just about time for breakfast. Just enough time to go looking for parts first. Did anyone on this ship actually sleep anymore?

-

“Keith?” Hunk said into his vent. “You seriously need to come out of there. I don’t know what you think is going to happen if you do, but you gotta face up to it. You’re a lot bigger than Pidge, you’re going to give yourself back problems.”

-

Shiro killed another Gladiator. It was a good thing the Castle had the ability to manufacture new training automata.

-

“Pidge,” said Allura, “the mice tell me we have a sudden infestation of mechanical beetles. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”

“Well…”

-

“Being a Paladin of Voltron,” Coran told the Red Lion as he very carefully wiped dust from her eyes, “means more than flying one of you. Remind your pilot of that for me?”

-

“Allura signed off on my cockroach simulation,” Pidge told Lance when she found him screaming about the giant monster roach he’d definitely just seen. He continued to rotate on the spot, hands flapping, ire focused on her now instead of the vent cover.

 “ _Why would you want to simulate roaches, no roaches are one of the benefits of space, you are insane, you are a goat’s mother…!_ ”

“They’re supposed to chase Keith out of the walls,” Pidge explained over Lance’s continued martyred ranting. “Also they’re going to be a backup security system, but right now they think all Galra are Keith, so.”

“Oh.” Abruptly calm again, he tapped his chin thoughtfully. “He used to live in a desert. Can you simulate some scorpions?”

-

“Last time I went grocery shopping there was a short Galra dude in the crowd—I dunno why, the whole reason we went to that moon is the Galra usually don’t—and I thought he was you for a second. I bet he didn’t even look like you, he had like, this weird frill on his head instead of hair, but I haven’t _seen_ you since you turned purple. So now I guess all purple things look like you? This is seriously confusing, Keith. Can you stop messing everything up? Space was confusing enough already.”

-

“This teamwork exercise,” Shiro said with weighty deliberation as they stood on the training deck in armor, “is designed to be completed by a group of four.” It had been fifteen days since they’d made it through any of the ones that needed five to succeed. It was time to face the reality that they might not have five Paladins anywhere but in the sky for the foreseeable future.

-

“This can’t go on,” Allura said very quietly, to herself, when she was all alone.

-

People were maybe loitering on the bridge for no particular reason more often than they used to. Lance was currently sitting there alone, sprawling due to the shortage of real chairs on the floor with his back against the half-wall of Shiro’s weird Captain-chair-like depression at the front of the bridge, that Shiro never really used except to get to his Lion because he was only captain of Voltron, not the Castle, and attempting to watch an Altean telenovela on a wrist computer. Altean romance was weird and involved a really startling number of duels, and his efforts to make sense of the plot were not being helped by his compulsively looking up every minute or so to check on the holographic display that had been locked on for five days now; since Allura had declared leaving Malbar that they had now proven they weren’t hunting Keith and he was going to have to put up with being tracked.

Lance looked up for about the fortieth time and almost looked right down again before what he’d just looked at reached his brain and he froze. The red Keith-dot wasn’t in the vents. It was down in the roots of the Castle, against an outside wall, near the part of the engines that actually put out propulsion. That row of creepy mind-sucking pods they’d spent most of a day hanging out in front of, back when they’d had Sendak prisoner.

Lance hesitated. Keith would probably have vanished back into the walls by the time Lance got there. He could send somebody else; several of the human dots were closer than he was.

Nah. His stakeout bonanza, his move.

When he got there, slightly out of breath, Keith was just sitting there, on the floor, with his back against one of the pods, like he’d been waiting for him. Or, well, someone; he made a kind of weird face, like he was surprised to see _Lance_ , specifically, but he didn’t try to get up and leave. So. That was a thing. Lance kept approaching, slower. Feeling kind of like he was dealing with one of the feral cats that used to live all over his neighborhood. The ears were kind of the same. The eyes were way more freaky.

He wasn’t wearing gloves.

Keith had looked away again almost as soon as Lance popped out into the hall, and his air of disinterest was almost the same as it used to be, except after he’d spent two weeks running away any time anybody might come near him Lance knew it was either fake or…what was this, giving up? Yeah. It looked like Keith was surrendering, except they weren’t _actually_ enemies. Did Keith know that, though.

“You know what these really are?” Keith asked when he got close. He was purple and fuzzy and honestly looked a lot like Sendak’s cute baby cousin, which it was reasonably possible he actually was.

“What, do you have some deep alien wisdom to lay on me?”

Keith rolled his eyes, probably. Lance was guessing that wasn’t a major Galra thing, because it didn’t work without pupils. “Hunk figured it out. I bet you can get it too.”

Lance lowered himself into a sit against the same pod, close enough that Keith could probably take his throat out with his claws in one swipe, but not close enough to touch without stretching awkwardly. “In all fairness, Hunk is smarter than me. Especially about machines.”

Keith shrugged. “The hint is what happened to Sendak.”

Never one to back down from a challenge, especially from his rival, Lance let his eyes rest on the opposite pod until they unfocused slightly. Shiro had spaced Sendak. That button there. What were the pods actually for? Not healing, obviously, and Keith was suggesting there was more to them than the mind-copying trick…. Partial biological suspension. Voluntary mind copying.

A large, prominently placed button that evacuated the occupant into space.

Lance yelped and scrambled instinctively away from the pod at his back. Keith’s weird Galra mouth was pulled all sideways like he was laughing at him without actually laughing. “You got it, then.”

“They’re _coffins?_ For—for space burial! What the quiznak?”

Keith tipped his skull back against the glass, unpleasant smile lingering. “This castle is designed to be crewed by hundreds. It’s equipped for up to twenty-six simultaneous funerals. It’s a mobile launch platform for Voltron. Altea was ready to fight a war, six hundred years before their last one. I wonder what happened.”

That was the most Lance had ever heard Keith say at once by about three hundred percent. No, wait, he’d explained about his insane quest for the Blue Lion in his desert shack after they rescued Shiro. Maybe just two hundred.

He propped himself back on his hands and decided to get comfortable sitting in the middle of the hall, because he didn’t feel like going back to touching the creepy burial-in-space devices. “I dunno, man. I’m sure Coran could tell you if you asked.”

Keith flinched. Just around the eyes, but that was even more obvious than it used to be, the sharp contrast of yellow against purple.

“Are you scared of _Coran?_ ”

Keith sighed, and tipped his head back against the coffin-pod even further. His neck was the same shade of purple as his face. Lance wondered if Galra could tan. “The last Galra to be caught on the Castle of Lions got put in one of these and then spaced alive.”


	6. A Series of Entanglements

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ATTENTION: If you read the last chapter in the first few hours after it was posted and (for some reason) still came back to read this one, please be advised that AO3 ate the bulk of last chapter besides the ending, and I had to re-upload it. You may wish to double back and read the complete version.
> 
> All I have to say about the upcoming chapter is it is the only one in the entire story where nobody eats anything. (Also Lance is cross with me for splitting his big scene in half and feeling that the absence of food from said scene is important information.)

“The last Galra to be caught on the Castle of Lions got put in one of these and then spaced alive.”

That was the second time Keith had brought that up, and both times in that weird, indirect way—it _got_ done, it _happened._ Lance squinted for a second, and then felt his mouth sag open as he got it. “C’mere,” he said abruptly, and kneeled up so he could lean over and yank Keith against his chest.

Keith did a weird thing where he almost flinched, then held very still, then got so confused his face was emitting _physically palpable_ confusion rays into Lance’s shoulder. “What are you doing.”

“I distinctly remember you saying you don’t hug strangers, but I’m not a stranger I’m a teammate, so here I am. Hugging. Grin and bear it.”

“You _hate_ me,” Keith pointed out.

“Pff. Don’t you ever listen. I haven’t _hated_ you since the food fight.”

“But—”

“No. No no nope. I am instituting the no-arguing against hugs policy, as originally formulated for baby cousins who thought they were too grown up for cuddles after they hurt themselves even though they really needed them. Shush.”

That actually worked, for some reason, which just proved all over again that Keith’s pride was in the gutter and rolling. He didn’t so much relax into the hug as settle down to endure it, but that was fine. “Good. Now listen. _Shiro is not going to kill you._ ”

Keith tensed up again.

“He is not even going to try to kill you. He is not going to _want_ to kill you. He’s been worried _sick_ about you. Like, kind of literally. Hunk’s actually reached the point of nagging him to eat.”

“But.” Lance didn’t cut Keith off this time, but it didn’t seem like he knew what to say next. He squirmed a little. “But you know what the Galra did to him.”

“You’re not ‘the Galra.’”

Keith swallowed. “I didn’t _tell_ him.”

“Did you _know?_ ”

“…I knew I wasn’t actually from Earth.”

Lance whistled a little. If he looked straight down he could see Keith’s ears, twitching a little occasionally, but if they worked as much like a cat’s as it seemed like, he was…mostly calm. Not wigging out, at least. Hug continuing, then. “Yeah, okay, that’s pretty big…hey. If you’re from space, is that why you’re such a good pilot? Were you _cheating?_ ”

Keith snorted. “I’d never flown anything real outside of atmo before the Red Lion, and none of the ships I’d seen piloted handled anything like the Garrison’s simulators. I’m just good.”

“Oh, and now the snob returns.” Lance didn’t mean it badly, and he didn’t say it meanly, but Keith went weirdly still anyway, in a way Lance probably wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t plastered up against him.

“I might be bred for handling null-grav environments, though,” Keith said. “Does that count as cheating?”

“I’ll take it,” Lance declared, magnanimous. Patted Keith on the back. Dude really did feel like he had a fever, but apparently that was normal for Galra. “Come on. Seriously though, you have to believe me. This is _me_ sitting here doing the hug thing, and as you pointed out I used to kind of hate you. Nobody hates you. We’re all kind of pissed off about you hiding in the vents avoiding us for two weeks, but we get it. Just come upstairs and go back to making Hunk happy by eating anything he cooks, and monopolizing the training deck, and whatever other stupid bullshit you used to get up to in your spare time.”

“Allura should have found a new Red Paladin by now,” Keith said, and for a second the words just didn’t make sense, and then Lance got it, and Keith went _oof_ as he got squeezed harder for a second.

“She isn’t even _looking_ , you stupid mullet-head. You thought we’d just written you off? Like you were—just a _mistake_ the Red Lion made, like—you’re the reason we found Blue in the first place! You _felt_ it. The only one here who’s more of a natural Paladin is Shiro, and he is _unreal._ ”

“Red almost didn’t let me in at all.”

“So? The pickiest Lion accepted you. You’re one of us. If—if you _die,_ or I guess if you man up and leave for real instead of playing fake ghost, we’ll have to look for somebody new because that’s how it works, but you can’t just…”

Keith made a small squashed noise, and not even because Lance was holding on too hard.

“You can’t expect us to _throw you away._ ”

“I can’t expect you to do anything else!” Keith retorted. “I’m the _enemy._ ”

Lance drew a deep breath, and then somehow let it out without shouting. He did give Keith a little shake. He was going to punch him so hard next time they were training together. So hard. “Oh, excuse me, was that you shooting at us? Looting innocent worlds? Stamping out freedom across the universe? It was not. People are enemies for what they _do,_ not what they are. I’ve _killed people_ since we got to space, okay, and I really hope I didn’t kill them for being Galra, I killed them because they were fighting for Zarkon and trying to kill _me_. The other way around would be totally messed up.”

Keith’s breath came out a little shaky. Lance reflexively tightened the arm across his back. “I don’t know you _super_ well, but I’d be really shocked if you were planning to exterminate the entire Galra race before this happened.”

“No. Just Zarkon. Just the Empire.”

“There, see? Our only enemies are the ones that choose to be. And, hey—maybe having you with us looking all purple will make some of the Galra realize they _have_ that choice. Wouldn’t that help a lot?”

Keith’s next breath was a little shakier, and suddenly his arms came up and squeezed Lance around the waist. The Blue Paladin may or may not have squeaked. It wasn’t _surprise_ , okay, Keith just squeezed the air out of him and it came out sounding like that.

Then Keith let go and leaned away, and Lance decided it was finally safe to give Keith his space back. Just in time, too, the metal floor was killing his knees. Keith’s weird little smile was starting to look less weird on his new face now. “When did _you_ get so wise?” he asked.

“Excuse you, I have always been brilliant and wise and handsome, not my fault you didn’t notice.” Lance sniffed, and Keith kind of laughed at him, but it wasn’t a problem like it used to be. “It’s your fault,” Lance said, clambering to his feet. “We’ve all had to do _so much_ soul-searching while you’ve been living in the quiznaking walls being useless, it’s been awful.”

“You really need to find out what that word actually means,” Keith told him, and he got up too.

“What, you going to tell me?”

“Nah.”

Lance thought about punching him on the shoulder, but too soon. “So, ready to stop being stupid?” he asked.

Keith blew out a breath. “You go on ahead. I’ll catch up.”

“What do I tell everybody?”

Keith shrugged. “Whatever you want. It’s not like I want to go over it all again more times than I have to.”

Lance was still mad. He was really, really mad. But—the thing where Keith’s whole existence had annoyed him? That was gone. And maybe it sucked that it took pity to make him change his mind, but. It was hard to be jealous of someone who’d been sitting waiting for somebody to try to throw him out into space, because he was too tired to run from it any longer.

He was starting to suspect that he and Hunk had the secret superpower of _not_ being severely traumatized and therefore slightly crazy. It was clearly his responsibility to wield this might for the betterment of Voltron. (While it lasted.)

-

Keith didn’t catch up. By the time Lance had finished explaining the whole thing to an audience of Pidge, Hunk, and Coran, it had become pretty clear he wasn’t going to, which meant Lance’s considerate gesture of not going and finding everyone to explain to all at once because that would mean putting Keith too much on the spot when he got here had been wasted. Jerk.

-

So recently, it would have been perfectly normal: Shiro was using the training deck; the door opened, and Keith came in.

The way it used to go was, Shiro would look over, and wave his arm, or occasionally not. If not, Keith would wait until Shiro finished. Otherwise, they would finish off the Gladiator ‘bot together, and either way they’d then restart on a higher setting.

Shiro shut his fist down instantly (not quite instantly) and stopped training immediately. “End simulation.” Because that time wasn’t long ago but now the armor Keith wore looked shabby with being lived in, grey dust ground in at the knees and all the hems scuffed and notched, and a green food-goo stain on one sleeve. He’d lost weight, and probably muscle tone.

And he was a Galra.

Allura still had his helmet, so Shiro could see the Red Paladin’s face for the first time in seventeen days.

Allura was right. You could find Keith in it, still. If his bones had shifted it had been—subtle. A broadening at the top of the nose, in his forehead maybe. Most of it was just—coloring. And his ears. His expression was blank; his hand fell on that knife he carried everywhere and for a second Shiro thought—well, not the worst, Keith challenging him openly to a knife fight would be a lot less terrible than his sliding out of the vents and killing their teammates when they were off their guard, but still fairly bad—and then Keith cast the weapon at Shiro’s feet.

Shiro knew he hadn’t moved to attack, during his bad moment, but he thought he might have flinched.

There was no way to tell by Keith’s expression. That was still blank.

He stood very straight, stiff rather than his normal upright but dynamic posture, the kind of parade-ready stance the top echelons of the Garrison liked to see for no reason Shiro had ever been able to discern—they weren’t training _ground troops_ , for crying out loud—and which Keith had never managed to do without a note of insincerity, until now. Snapped a perfect Earth-style salute. ( _Vrepit sa,_ recited something at the back of Shiro’s head, but of course Keith wasn’t going to say _that_.) “Submitting myself to discipline for dereliction of duty.”

“Keith, you don’t have to…”

Keith _did_ wait for him to finish the sentence, but when Shiro didn’t he asked, still holding the salute, “Would you like my report now?”

Shiro rubbed a hand over the scar on his face. “At ease, Paladin,” he tried. That helped; Keith unbent a little, though Shiro wasn’t sure whether it was the command or the use of his title. “And I’d rather you just _tell me_ , but yes, I’d like to hear whatever you have to say. If a report format will help, then…feel free.”

Keith lowered his hand. “I don’t know what I am,” he stated. He was still staring off over Shiro’s shoulder, or at least it seemed like it—he _could_ be watching Shiro’s face and he wouldn’t be able to tell. “Not exactly. I’m not…even sure why this happened. But I knew I wasn’t. Human.”

Shiro swallowed. Well, that cleared up some questions. Like the ones attached to the possibility that all of this was _just_ an over-the-top reaction to something one of Haggar’s druids had done. Quick, an innocuous question, one that would actually draw out information. “How did you know that?”

“I only came to Earth about four years ago.”

That would do it. “That explains a lot,” Shiro said, possibly pretty dryly, and was rewarded by Keith’s façade cracking. His new pointed ears flattened themselves slightly, and he looked—possibly hurt?

But then looked down, smiled a little, sort of wry. “Yeah.”

Keith was exactly the sort of person you would not expect to be assigned to undercover work. He could be stealthy, but he wasn’t _subtle._ If you were to have lined the five Paladins up back on Earth and told someone to pick the alien in the group after five minutes of conversation with each of them, Keith might admittedly have been picked second after Pidge by a lot of people, but well ahead of Lance or Hunk. And probably Shiro. He’d always considered himself pretty ordinary. But then, Keith had never seemed more than very, very awkward.

Not that never having fully assimilated into human culture really made him any less awkward. It wouldn’t have been very hard to pick up at least the most popular references if he’d made an effort.

“So…where were you before?”

Keith shrugged. Shiro was glad he was relaxing but wished he was trying harder to give a thorough report. “Around. Neutral ports. Anywhere outside the Empire. Zarkon wiped out the last major Resistance when I was nine.” Implicit in this string of vague facts was a whole outline of Keith’s early life that Shiro could only half pick apart, and didn’t really need to just now, any more than he had when he’d thought that vague outline belonged on Earth, with Social Services and foster families.

Shiro remembered suddenly Keith’s voice, that first flight on Arus when Sendak had caught all five Lions in a tractor beam that made the Paladins’ bones ache through their bonds with the futile effort to fight it: _‘It’s been an honor flying with you boys.’_ Before they’d accomplished anything together, when they’d still barely been a team at all. An honor. It had seemed a perfectly natural thing to say at the time, and all Shiro had heard in it was solidarity he approved of, and surrender to their doom that he did not.

“I was in the area because of rumors about Voltron,” Keith admitted, and even after most of a year in the universe-straddling intergalactic society that was the Galra Empire there was something odd about hearing someone say ‘in the area’ and probably mean something on the scale of the Milky Way galaxy on up, though not as odd as it would have sounded if Keith had still looked human. “Then I pretty much got stranded.”

Shiro thought of the Keith he’d met three and a half years ago; skinny, wary little cadet with brilliant scores. A lone alien fugitive, barely more than a child, stranded on Earth. Had he joined the Galaxy Garrison because it offered a chance to get out into the stars again? (What a shock that would have been for his teammates on whatever deep space mission he’d turned into First Contact. Or would he have been willing to contact anyone, when the authorities in most of space were the Galra Empire?) Keith wasn’t incapable with machines, but he was no Hunk or Pidge; it made sense that he hadn’t had a prayer of building his own spaceship.

It had never seemed productive before to wonder why Keith had been the one who was drawn to the Blue Lion when Lance was its pilot.

If he’d already been hiding things about himself, it did make more sense that he’d tried so desperately to hide this. He’d wondered these past weeks how they’d earned so little trust. (It had hurt, that he had earned so little trust.)

“I’m glad you did,” he said. And not just because the Blue Lion would probably never have found its Paladin or escaped ahead of the Galra sent to capture it, without the guidance they’d had from Keith’s research.

Keith seemed to have mixed feelings about what should have been a comforting statement. Oh. He felt guilty.

“Keith,” Shiro pointed out, making his way forward. He stepped over Keith’s knife, not on it. “You aren’t the first one here to reveal a hidden identity.”

That was almost definitely a dismissive ear-twitch. (Which left the question of whether he was emoting with his ears on purpose. It seemed unlikely.) “Pidge was just hiding her name and sex,” Keith countered. “She was totally upfront with her motives as soon as it was possible.”

“I think you’re being too hard on yourself,” Shiro said. “Pidge told us things about herself once it felt safe and necessary to do so. I don’t think telling us about your background felt any safer to you than Pidge would have telling her plans to anyone at the Garrison. And you had even more to lose if it didn’t work out.”

Because Katie could have gone home to her mother if she had to drop out—her infiltration was two or three different felonies, but she was a minor and prosecuting her under the circumstances would have been terrible press—but Keith was now a public opponent of Zarkon in an empire spanning most of the known universe. And a Lion was a much bigger loss than a potential lead, even on your family.

“We’re supposed to be a team,” said Keith.

“Pidge, Hunk, and Lance were supposed to be a team at the Garrison. She didn’t tell them anything. Keith, I’m not saying you made definitely the right choice not trusting us, I’m just saying you weren’t being terrible either. This team was thrown together by circumstances. You didn’t choose us. It’s okay that it took you a while to be comfortable.”

He should have had the chance to decide to confess on his own, not been cornered into it by Druidic meddling.

“I chose _you_ ,” Keith pointed out in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. “I mean, I did choose to stay with this team. It was made clear the kind of commitment that was.” He fidgeted, the pale claws at the ends of purple fingers digging into the side of his thigh, then drawing back again.

He folded them under and pressed with his knuckles instead, less like he’d minded the pain than like he didn’t want Shiro to see. “I’d been telling myself for a while I should come clean, waiting for a good time, but the…this thing spooked me. I told myself I’d talk to you all once I got it under control. But I couldn’t get it under control. It just got worse. And I didn’t—want to tell you I’d been keeping secrets all along while _looking like a Galra_.”

“Keith—”

“I know. I _know_. So I just kept putting it off.”

Shiro smiled a little. “And it got to a point where you felt like the reasonable solution was to move into the vents,” he teased. They were an ordinary conversational distance apart, now; if Keith felt loomed over he could step back, but he wasn’t.

Keith swallowed and looked even more away. “Well. I couldn’t _leave_. You guys need a Red Paladin, and there weren’t any replacements available.”

“So you did the closest thing to leaving you could while still staying in the Castle,” Shiro summed up. “That—actually makes sense.”

Keith’s head jerked up, and he looked straight at Shiro with his blank Galra eyes for the first time. “What, really?”

Shiro put a hand on his shoulder. “Well, it’s an off-the-wall, over-the-top solution to the problem that doesn’t take everyone else’s perspectives into account very well, but yeah. I can see how you got there. It’s very you,” he teased.

Keith cringed slightly at that last bit. His ears flattened, which made it look more dramatic than it would have before. “I thought you’d be furious,” he said.

Shiro paused. He didn’t usually think of himself as an angry person, but his time in the arena had taught him to be capable of something that resembled berserk rage when he needed it, and it…wasn’t unreasonable for that to have made an impression on Keith. “You can’t help where you come from,” he said gently.

Keith’s ears managed to fold further. If Shiro had been trying to be mad it would have been foul play, he looked like a _kitten_. “I didn’t _tell_ you.”

“Which wasn’t the best decision, as part of the team, but I told you it’s understandable.”

“You went into _space_ and got _captured,_ and I _knew_ there were Galra in space but I didn’t _warn_ you. Why aren’t you mad.”

Had he really been blaming himself for that since the Kerberos mission vanished, or just since he’d found out why?

He shook the shoulder in his grip, just a little, hopefully in a grounding sort of way. “Keith, knowing about the existence of the Galra Empire ahead of time would not have helped in any way. It wouldn’t have let me save the mission. It would just have meant that when they first took us I would have spent less time confused and more time knowing what to be afraid of. And really, in terms of the universe Kerberos and Earth are right next door. It wasn’t _that_ much more likely our ship would run into the Galra than that the Galra would invade Earth. Maybe less, I don’t know enough about how their scanners work. Just because it happened doesn’t mean it was probable,” he added.

Pidge or Hunk might have pointed out that since it had happened, you _could_ say in retrospect that it had had 100% probability, because both of them played games with numbers when they wanted to deflect people who weren’t math geeks, but this was Keith, so he just looked sort of baffled.

And purple.

It was actually a good thing Shiro had had a while to get used to the idea. It wasn’t hard to see Keith when he looked at the Galra youngster standing on their training deck. (He was glad he was taller than Keith. He never used to especially care about his height, but if Keith had been tall enough that Shiro had to look up it would have been—harder.) Most of the Galra he’d seen in and around the arena had been grunts with their visors on; just seeing Keith’s eyes at all was enough to—humanize him. (They needed a better word for that.)

“I knew you weren’t going to kill me,” Keith said.

Shiro blinked, startled. Let his hand fall off Keith’s shoulder and realized it had been the Galra hand, which wasn’t usually his first choice to reach out to people with if he stopped to think about it, even if it was his dominant side. (He could have ignited it and sliced Keith’s head off in a second from that position, _had Keith been expecting him to?_ ) “Uh, good,” he answered. “I’m…glad you knew that.”

“Sendak gave you a reason,” Keith continued, and now Shiro’s blood felt like ice because of _course_ Keith had thought the worst of him, after that. After he’d _murdered_ a prisoner in their keeping without justification, actually counter to their strategic goals. Because he lost control.

Shiro made things that upset him go away by killing them. That was who he _was_ now.

“Not a good enough one,” he murmured. His mechanical knuckles creaked.

The sound brought Keith’s attention lasering in on it—the tilt of his head and his ears told a story Shiro was surprised he could read so easily. He tried to open his hand, to not present a fist, but he physically _could not_.

Keith was afraid of him. He’d told Allura it wasn’t her, but he hadn’t realized. It had been him all along.

“I,” Shiro said helplessly. Wanting to apologize. Not having the right words. He took a belated step backward.

“Shiro.” That expression was all Keith, awkward concern slanting from under bent eyebrows. “What’s wrong?”

“I wouldn’t hurt you, Keith,” he said. Wanted to add _you know that, right?_ except for the fact that he obviously didn’t.

Keith blinked, then gave an agreeable little shrug that was also all him, and hadn’t changed at all from being Galra. “Which meant that if you did, it was because I deserved it.”

Shiro’s stomach clenched. “Keith,” he said firmly, “you haven’t done _anything_ anyone should kill you for.” The man he’d been a year ago might have said there was no such crime, but they were fighting a war now. “I don’t think you ever would,” he added.

And Keith, who had already looked dreadfully comforted by the first declaration, as if he’d _genuinely thought_ race or secrecy could ever merit death—he’d grown up around the fringes of the Galra Empire, who knew what his standards were for crime and punishment, keep that in mind—Keith _lit up_.

Shiro had known from almost the first time he met Keith that what the kid needed more than anything was someone who believed in him. He hadn’t given the knowledge much thought, because there hadn’t been much reason he could see to hesitate to be that person.

Caring wasn’t something you got to stop doing because it had stopped being easy.

He turned away to go pick up Keith’s knife, was relieved when he turned back to see Keith’s ears pricked up in interest and his face set into its old neutral lines with a hint of bemusement. He hadn’t assumed the worst this time. They weren’t so broken.

He went back and offered Keith his weapon back, hilt-first; Keith hesitated a moment, then took it, slid it back into the sheath at his back. “Allura still has your bayard,” Shiro said apologetically. Keith nodded. “I don’t think I can punish you for dereliction of duty,” he continued, “since you were there every time we mustered, but you have been skipping out on training. So. Mandatory training sessions with me or one of the others every day after lunch, on top of attending all the group practices from now on. And you have to help make dinner every day for a month.” Punishing _Keith_ for skipping training seemed inherently vaguely ridiculous, but he had turned up talking about disciplinary action, and this neatly forced him to spend most of his time between breakfast and dinner around people, unless no one else wanted to cook on any particular day.

Keith snorted, but it was the amused kind. “I get _mess duty_ for secretly being a Galra?”

“You don’t get any punishment for turning out to be any kind of alien, you get a month of mess duty for hiding in the walls instead of talking to us.”

Further bemused amusement. “Well, I guess I won’t do _that_ again.”

“You’d better not.” This time when Shiro smiled, the Red Paladin smiled back.

Looked away quickly, but that was just how Keith was. “So, is that…everything? You wanted to ask? For now.”

Shiro rubbed the back of his neck. “There was one other thing.”

“Name it.”

Now his question felt like an anticlimax. “You don’t have to answer, obviously, but I wanted to ask…is Keith your real name?”

Keith’s mouth twitched into an uncertain shape, and Shiro expected him to ask what counted as real or something like that, but all he said was, “It might be short for something.”

Shiro cocked his head. “Might?”

Keith’s eyes slid away, which Shiro probably wouldn’t have been able to tell without the fact that his face followed them slightly. That was going to be a problem; Keith had always communicated largely with his eyes. The ears were filling in some of the gap, at least. “I really was orphaned pretty young. That part was never a lie.”

Shiro’s heart broke a little. He reached out with his human hand, slow so Keith had plenty of time to object, and wrapped it around his back. Keith was warm and real and not _gone_ , and it was ridiculous and awful that he’d thought they’d want anything else. Perfectly understandable, but ridiculous. “Neither was this,” he said.

Keith let out a long slow breath, and then practically _snuggled_ up against him. Whoah. Well, okay. Shiro adjusted his grip to take advantage of having more reach from this angle, then gingerly patted Keith on the back with the other arm. Shiro wasn’t a hugely experienced hugger, to be honest, and he hadn’t thought Keith was either—but then, this was kind of a little kid’s way of accepting a hug, wasn’t it? Maybe he was going back to some very old habits.

Keith’s voice was muffled by Shiro’s chest when he spoke. “First Lance and now you. Is everybody going to want to hug me?” He didn’t do a very good job of pretending to be disgruntled.

Probably not Coran or Allura. “You’ve been staying out of our reach for too long,” he said. “I’m overcompensating.”

Keith chuckled, even though the joke hadn’t been very funny. Or a joke at all, really.

Shiro paused. “…wait, Lance hugged you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another of the squares on my 'lol what if' bingo card this fic fills is 'lol what if the reason Keith is so weird is he is actually from space and hasn't found a good way to tell anybody.'
> 
> Very last chapter likely to come out on the same day as season two so nobody will read it? Huh, I'll try to hustle and post on Thursday.


	7. A Series of Impacts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so AO3 says it's the 20th but it's still Thursday here for another four and a bit hours! I am posting this and then I have a pork roast to take out of the oven and Hunk to impersonate. ^^ Lots of love to everyone who enjoyed this with me and Gawain, it's been a high-speed blast.

Keith dogged Shiro’s heels a little closely as he led him into the habitation deck and toward the lounge. That was better than trailing far behind, so Shiro didn’t say anything. Made sure to keep up a steady pace so Keith didn’t have to worry about running into him. He did step to one side and pause, before opening the door, to give the Red Paladin a chance to gather himself.

“You ready?” he asked.

Keith swallowed, and nodded hard.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Shiro promised. Opened the door, ignoring the look of alarm Keith shot him at the information that he wasn’t going to lead him in.

If he’d hesitated long enough Shiro might have relented, but after only a tick or so Keith pulled his shoulders back, raised his chin, and walked forward.

-

Lance might have—not orchestrated what happened when Keith walked out into middle of the room, he couldn’t claim to have thought ahead to it—but set it up, anyway. Because he might have let slip that he’d hugged Keith while updating everyone on the Red Paladin’s messed-up purple headspace. And while defending that decision might have stressed just _how much_ it had seemed to be helping. Just. For the record. Keith appreciated a good hug. Lance's hugs were of course awesome.

And Lance had previously _heard_ him verbally lay out his hugging rules and they consisted of ‘usually not strangers,’ and even then maybe, if they were cuddly and they started it, _so there_ , it wasn’t weird. Shut up Gunderson.

So it was Lance’s fault when Hunk got up and crossed the room to meet Keith in the middle, exclaimed, “We were worried!” and flung both arms around him.

He’d bent down a little to do it even though they were nearly of a height, probably specifically so he could pick Keith up off the ground as he did a second later. Keith flailed, briefly, claws raking the air as though he thought he could swim his way back to solid ground—and just as he settled again Pidge caught up, rocketed into their sides, and insinuated one arm between Hunk’s ribs and Keith’s stomach.

The added weight convinced Hunk to let Keith sink back to the floor, to his evident relief. He celebrated by putting his right arm over Hunk’s shoulders, his left around Pidge’s, and saying in a rather cracked voice, “I do actually still need to breathe, though.”

Pidge laughed at him and compressed his diaphragm harder.

Then Allura, drawn to the sound of excitement, entered the room through the bridge door. At the sight of the ongoing only slightly vengeful group hug, and the party in the middle, she broke into a smile.

“You came back!” she exclaimed, as if a family member had unexpectedly returned from a long journey. And then the Princess was in motion, her arms spread in clear declaration of intent. Keith’s eyes and Hunk’s had just time to widen in realization before she struck the small tangle of Paladins in a whirlwind of pale skirts and paler hair.

In her enthusiasm, she clearly misjudged the solidity of Earthlings, or failed to consider that the main structural element of the conglomeration was Hunk, whose feet were relatively close together compared to the spread of weight at the top and who, encumbered by the hug, couldn’t really maneuver to regain balance. Almost inevitably, Allura collided with the nonstandard Paladin formation and then they all tipped over and landed, inexorably, in an even more tangled heap, only partially on the sofa. Allura kept her arms looped around the three of them as they all went down, as if she thought falling over was a method of escape and they might all disappear given a chance. Pidge squeaked more from compression than alarm, squashed between Allura and Keith’s torsos, Hunk said, “whoah, hey!”

And then Keith, almost completely hidden by his teammates’ bodies, started to laugh. “Hi,” he said. Somewhat muffled. “I. Wasn’t expecting this kind of reception.”

Hunk huffed. “Seriously? After I’ve spent like twenty minutes every day talking into a hole in the wall in case you could hear?”

“And I pulled a bunch of all-nighters to make robots to keep an eye on you.”

Keith extricated one hand from under Allura’s shoulder to hold it up, ‘stop.’ “You made giant cockroaches. And then also scorpions. You told Lance they were to _chase_ me out of the walls.”

Pidge might have had the grace to look embarrassed. She was completely invisible except for her feet, so no one could tell. “Yeah, well. It worked.” She wriggled. “Move?”

No one could unless Allura let go, and she did after a moment and sat up, smoothing her hair and restoring her dignity as much as she could without getting up off the floor. Hunk and Pidge untangled their respective limbs; he rolled right, she scooched left, and Keith wound up still surrounded, cornered against the foot of the couch with everyone’s legs still jumbled close together.

“Oh, I see how it is,” Lance scoffed, leaning against one end of the half-wall encircling the sofa enclosure and looking loftily down on them all. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so you cleverly stayed away until everyone would be so happy to see you it would overwhelm the mad, and now you get to be in a cuddle pile with the beautiful princess.”

Keith seemed momentarily stricken at the accusation, then flicked his ears back and said, “No one’s stopping you from joining.”

Pidge snickered and rolled to put the edge of the couch flat against her back. “He can’t _now_ , he’d make it weird.”

“Anyway he already got his recommended daily allowance of Keith cuddles,” declared Hunk. He propped his elbows back on the couch cushions and shoved Keith with the side of his thigh. “Which is a figure that is going up in future but man, there’s no polite way to say this, you seriously need to shower.”

Keith’s ears flattened. “Sorry.” He tried to stand up, and Allura placed a hand in the middle of his chest and casually shoved him down again.

“No.”

Keith blinked. “Okay.”

Shiro, still standing on the upper level, turned his head away to hide how tempted he was to laugh. Coran was opposite him, and seemed to have no objection to the current affront to Allura’s royal dignity.

“So what’s this I hear about you _knowing_ you were an alien?” Pidge demanded.

“…there was never a good time to bring it up?”

She punched him in the shoulder. “You’re the only one here who knows what space is like _now_ instead of ten thousand years ago! You didn’t think that was an important resource to share?”

“…sorry. I don’t know that much, though.”

“You’re going to tell me all of it, and I am going to _write it down._ ”

“I could write it down,” Keith pointed out, like maybe it had slipped the Green Paladin’s mind that he was in fact literate.

“No, you wouldn’t even know the right questions to ask yourself.”

“…okay,” he said again. Lance laughed at him.

Shiro and Coran exchanged a look over the top of the sofa-enclosure, Shiro for once feeling like they were on exactly the same page.

“It’s good to have you back,” said Hunk. Like the only thing out-of-place had been Keith’s absence and everything could resume normally now that that was amended. It was a kind of enviable viewpoint, even if he was secretly working for it. “Stench and all.”

“What he said,” agreed Pidge, knocking their shoulders together.

“But really!” Allura held up a finger and shook it in Keith’s face. “Once it was clear we all understood you were yourself, and trusted you to join us on the battlefield, you had no excuse for returning to your isolation! No one but you could have flown the Red Lion over Malbar, and no one but a loyal member of Voltron would have fought as you did.”

Keith’s expression went blank and strange, and he said—sort of bitterly—“Princess, we both know Zarkon would give up a lot more than a few bases or a few _worlds_ to get a spy trusted by you and the Paladins.”

Well, that was true. None of them could claim it wasn’t true. Zarkon had not blinked at the massive damage to his central command station in the cause of capturing the Lions. It still took Allura a few seconds to find words to respond that were not simply negation.

“…you thought sending you to defend Inistree was a _test?_ ”

“And if we were already testing him, he’s right, Inistree wouldn’t have proved anything, because the Galra Empire doesn’t look after its own.” Pidge propped her chin on her knee thoughtfully. “Huh. I’m trying to think of what _would_ count as proof Keith was really on our side if we didn’t believe it, and even trying to kill Zarkon doesn’t do it, because when he did that it was a bad strategic decision that put the rest of us in danger, and didn’t work.”

That observation bought several seconds’ silence, and then Keith flicked his ears and said, “Sorry?”

Lance snorted. “No, man, you’re supposed to say _owch,_ or maybe _burn._ I’ll do it for you: ooh, _burrrrrrrrrn._ ”

Pidge clicked her tongue. “I didn’t actually mean it like that.”

“Just to be clear, guys?” put in Hunk. “That was a very important ‘if,’ because we do trust Keith and he doesn’t have to do anything crazy to convince us. Which is a thing he absolutely understands. Right Keith?”

“Uh…right.”

Allura’s irritation had not been soothed by the Paladins’ byplay. “So you thought I was giving you orders to test your obedience. When I invited you to the celebration of victory afterward did you think it was a _trap?_ ”

“I doubted you really wanted me to go out and represent Voltron looking like this.” A tooth that really deserved the appellation of ‘fang’ hooked over his lip, and turned the brief smile after it shy and strange. “Lance thinks I have the potential to be good propaganda, though.”

“I did not say that! Not like _that_.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think that sounded like your choice of words,” said Hunk.

“I _just meant_ having someone who looks like them on our team could make some of the Galra pay more attention, like proof we don’t actually want to kill them all.”

Hunk made a grimace, obviously not having considered that they might look like they might be plotting massive genocide; the others besides Keith looked thoughtful. “Do you think that would still work even though he’s not exactly a Galra?” Pidge asked.

Keith gave a little shrug. “I mean, Zarkon already told me I fight like a Galra soldier, so probably.”

Shiro winced. That had to have been haunting Keith this whole time. The others seemed to agree. “Aw, man,” said Hunk. “Is that why?” He squinted. “Wait, do you think this was _him?_ ”

Attention went to Allura, then to Coran. Coran shrugged. “It isn’t something I knew he could do, but I certainly couldn’t swear to it that he _can’t_.”

“He has had ten thousand years to learn new tricks,” Allura agreed. She picked herself up from the floor, shaking her skirts out, which Lance took as some sort of cue to grab a spot on the sofa, his knee bumping Hunk’s outside shoulder.

“Who cares who did it,” said Lance. “The point is Keith’s Purple Panic was excessive and not to be repeated. You got that?”

“Seconded,” said Pidge.

“Yup,” said Hunk. “Seriously, you were being a creepy stalker up in the ceiling, I don’t understand how you failed to figure out that hiding from us was a bad idea.”

“Hiding the problem was stupid, but it makes sense, but once we already knew?” Pidge shook her head.

“What your fellow Paladins mean, I think,” said Allura, smiling slightly down on the four of them, “is that we have all been very concerned.”

“I’m…sorry I worried you.” Keith said it awkwardly, which wasn’t especially usual—he _was_ awkward but he didn’t usually seem to notice, or at least care, so his attitude didn’t usually reflect it—but more than that, it sounded recited. Like he knew these were the words to say in this kind of situation, but had never expected to need to put that information to use himself.

At least two of his fellow Paladins independently found that sort of heartbreaking. (At least one of them found it annoying because any reasonable person should have realized ages ago that their little crew was bound to worry when any of them was in trouble, even if Keith always had tried to act like he didn’t.)

“Look,” said Hunk. Hitched his torso around so he was facing Keith a little more and could gesture freely with his right arm, though the left was now somewhat pinned against the front of the couch, “Lance and me are the legs, right? You guys have to rely on us. And Shiro is the head so trust him to make good decisions. You and Pidge are going to go off and do your own things a lot, we all get that, hands are all…independent and stuff.” He held up his own, fingers wiggling, and spread them out to the sides as if this illustrated his point. “But you can’t just…take your arm off and leave it someplace. Or let it wander away. We’re Voltron. We all have to...stay connected. Does that make sense? Am I making sense? This is the obvious metaphor, I mean, it’s not even really a metaphor, I am actually a leg.”

“It makes sense,” Lance assured his leg-buddy. Digging his real knee companionably into his spine. “Even though I don’t like the idea of people _standing on me_. I like that we _all know_ I’m not going to just walk away and leave you guys trying to build, like, a giant robotic peg-leg.”

“Listen,” Pidge said, and pushed her glasses up her nose so they caught the light and hid her eyes. “Keith, look at it this way. Shiro’s already lost one right arm. You don’t want to put him through that twice, right?”

There was a beat of shocked silence, and then everyone, even Coran, turned and looked at Shiro to see how he was taking that. The answer was ‘well,’ because it wasn’t anything he hadn’t thought before. His smile came out a little wry. “I’m sure he doesn’t,” he said. “Hunk, you made a lot of sense. Keith’s been condemned to thirty days of mess duty. If no one else is cooking, he is. If you’re cooking, he’s your dogsbody.”

“Catsbody,” corrected Lance. Was ignored.

Hunk was delighted. “Awesome! I mean, sorry dude, sucks being punished,” he added insincerely, “but if I can make you do all the grunt work I can get a lot more done. There’s some ideas I’ve been wanting to try with the ingredients I picked up on Ulchin 4—oh hey, you haven’t had any of the space turkey yet! Unless you already ate it when you lived in space before, I guess. Come on, you can try that and we can get started.”

“Not quite yet!”

With that expostulation Coran nipped in, hoisted Keith over his shoulder, and made for the door with long strides. Keith’s receding face was frozen into a mask of shock, his hands curled into half-fists to prevent the claws digging into either himself or Coran as he pushed his upper body away from the Altean’s back to keep eyes on his fellow Paladins. It was obviously costing him a lot not to fight. “Hey!” Hunk protested. “That’s my sous-chef!”

“And you can have him back when an even more important obligation has been discharged! Number Two,” Coran said, “I’m pleased to see you amending the neglect to your other Paladin responsibilities, but you owe one more set of apologies.”

“What, to you?” asked Lance, baffled.

“Certainly not! Even if the Red Paladin did not trust _us,_ there is one other party who has missed him outside of battle.”

The Red Lion, they all realized at once. The duo had seemed fine, maneuvered well in the air—but then, he’d coordinated acceptably with the rest of the team as well. That didn’t mean everything had been fine. And they’d had eyes on the BLIP scanner continually enough that if he’d come out of the walls to visit her since Malbar, someone probably would have noticed.

Keith’s shoulders slumped slightly, surrendering to being hauled like a sack of truant potatoes, and he tossed Hunk an awkward claw-tipped wave as he vanished backward through the door. “Catch you in a bit, Big Guy.”

Hunk couldn’t really argue with that. “Take a shower and be ready to tell me your favorite foods!”

-

“Keith,” said Allura at dinner, which was in fact amazing even if it had more fruit combined with meat than Pidge was personally in favor of. “Part of the reason we wish you had come to us right away is that we would have liked to opportunity to help sooner. Have you concluded there is no way to reverse your appearance?”

“I don’t know what they _did,_ I don’t know if it’s undoable.” Keith shrugged. Stabbed a sliver of space turkey with his fork and swept it through the steamed space-pineapple-that-looked-sort-of-like-blueberries sauce. “I don’t have any way to fix it. ‘Wishing very hard’ doesn’t work.”

“Then you probably are not a natural shapeshifter,” Allura said. “Regrettably.” Keith looked like that possibility had not been on his list, but nodded. “That would have been simplest. Well. We neglected to record your original genetic profile, but we tested samples from what was probably an intermediate period. If there has been any significant change since, that will give us a direction to begin.”

“It’ll tell us a lot even if there hasn’t,” said Pidge.

They didn’t rush off to run tests right after dinner, though; by agreement between Shiro and Allura and, tacitly, everybody else, everyone besides Coran lingered in the lounge, playing improvised versions of Earth board games (easier to reproduce than cards) and watching an ancient Altean television show that Lance kept interrupting Allura’s game to ask for explanations about. The goal was to resettle into the feeling of normal, and into the fact that Keith’s presence _was_ normal, for everyone. He seemed to be trying.

Shiro tugged Keith aside after he surrendered the shougi crown to Hunk with less of a fight than their usual aggression-versus-defense strategic approaches usually caused, pulled him a little way from the others but not right into a corner. “Yeah?” Keith asked, ears twitching, a little more tense than Shiro would have preferred.

“I hope,” Shiro said, and that he was saying it in a public space loud enough for people to eavesdrop if they felt like it was clearly intentional; his tone was comprised of two parts leaderly reproof to one part gentle teasing, “that now that I’m aware of your background, you’ll feel more comfortable running your field calls past me.”

He wasn’t wrong—Keith’s startled expression as he realized Shiro wasn’t wrong emphasized it—but it was still unexpected to consider that some part of the Red Paladin’s characteristic impulsivity had nothing to do with reliance on intuition or lack of self-control, and everything to do with the distance he’d always kept, even from Shiro. Hunk raised his eyebrows as he stacked hand-lettered shougi tiles back into their box, and Lance blatantly turned the volume down on his telenovela to eavesdrop.

“I know you’re used to knowing more than your authority figures and overruling their judgments as a result, but I need you to _trust_ me. If there’s information I don’t have, give it to me so I can factor it in for the overall plan. Okay?”

Keith nodded. He looked wretched.

“We’re not mad at you,” Shiro said, a little more gently. “I understand you were making the best of what seemed like an impossible situation. You did your very best not to let the team down, and we all recognize that. But at the same time, this can’t happen again. Consider yourself on indefinite assignment to improve your communications skills.”

This directive would have been onerous enough on its own, but it had been said in front of everyone, who now knew and would be able to call him out on future failure or lack of effort. Indefinitely.

Keith’s punishment complete, Shiro reached out left-handed, smiling, ruffled his hair, and went over to lose to Pidge at checkers.

-

Just as he blasted a Galra ship to shards, Keith felt it. The uncomfortable pressure, like the top of his head was getting a cramp. It would ease up soon enough, he knew—the Altean helmet was designed to fit whoever wore it, and accommodate shapeshifting. But right now, he was feeling the pinch.

“Code,” Keith gave a little sigh because he had been excluded from the naming process, “Grape Soda, guys.”

Lance blew air through his teeth. “What, again? There are definitely some environmental factors involved here that we haven’t figured out.”

“The correlation with fights is high enough there has to be some kind of limbic trigger,” argued Pidge.

“Can we at least finish the fight before you go back to working on the Keith science project?” the Keith science project asked. Absolutely none of his teammates had any real training in medicine or even biology, but that hadn’t stopped any of them. Except Shiro. Shiro was the best.

They did—mostly, there was still some absent comm chatter on the subject—and then landed their Lions in a circle on the sunbaked ground. There were things to deal with at ground level on planet Quotid, before they could go home and rest and poke Keith with sensors. The locals here had five legs each, arranged roughly in a circle, and three arms, and four biological sexes and five genders, the proper terms for which none of the Paladins except possibly Pidge had had time to start learning yet. They were rather small as people went, and as the Paladins of Voltron left their Lions and gathered around their local contact the round little being began to look somewhat loomed over.

Pidge might be doing it on purpose. She didn’t get many opportunities to loom. Except inside Green, but that was different.

Keith climbed out last.

There were purple-skinned species in the universe that weren’t Galra, but the yellow eyes that showed through the Red Paladin’s visor were unambiguous. Their pentapedal ally flushed orange and skittered backward several steps before recovering their manners. “You have a Galra serving as part of Voltron?”

“Sometimes,” shrugged Pidge.

“It’s what you might call a _chronic condition,_ ” grinned Hunk.

Keith’s expression hopefully suggested that he would have been telling them how much he hated them if he hadn’t felt the need to be diplomatic. “Mixed,” he said stiffly, which was still more of an assumption than anything they _knew_ but served as an explanation, and the pentaped’s confusion lifted slightly; they turned a delicate cerulean.

“Well,” they said. “Are you the one who’s going to talk to the prisoners?”

Keith nodded. It was hard to read more than broad emotions on such an alien physique, but the Quotidian looked like they might be wondering how that would work when Keith didn’t seem to be much for talking at all. “Won’t you come this way,” they said.

Fortunately, they didn’t expect him to walk into the middle of a crowd of Galra and talk terms. The surrendering troops had been walled up in their barracks, which each had a communications system in one wall, and some Quotidian technicians had slaved all three to a nearby surveillance post, where the Galra could be watched and, if necessary, communicated with.

Either the prisoners hadn’t thought of destroying the cameras embedded in the official equipment now controlled by the rebels, or they suspected it would violate the terms of their surrender, because three barracks’ worth of Galra troops appeared on the screens. Most of these Galra were young; Quotid had housed training facilities, which was why there had been so many concentrated in one non-Galra world, so the local garrison had a certain resemblance to what might have happened if aliens had taken over the Garrison on Earth. Although, Keith thought, probably with significantly less panic.

Lounging on bunks, most of them, tense but trying not to show it. Tossing and batting back and forth little balls that seemed to have been made by tying knots in pieces of ripped-up clothes. (They’d been denied blankets for security reasons.) A few had claimed open patches of floor and were exercising, one woman with a pair of swept-back goat’s horns doing pushups with the same form and rhythm Shiro tended to fall into after he’d been doing them for a while.

They just looked like people, when you caught them unawares.

Keith squared his shoulders and lifted his chin, and left his helmet on—because he was a Paladin of Voltron, because he wasn’t one of them, not really, and because Shiro had informed him that his ears telegraphed his feelings and since he had no idea how to make them stop, that probably wouldn’t improve the strength of his presentation. He activated the camera.

“This is the Red Paladin of Voltron,” he announced levelly, trying to ignore the startled way their attention flicked from his face to his uniform and back. It was easier than if he’d been facing them in person. At least a few of them were probably Resistance, but figuring out for sure which ones would take a while they didn’t have right now. “Your parole was guaranted by my commander. I’m here to talk about your choices going forward.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :} So I went and created a vague sprawling future for GalraKeith. Now, happy new season to my fellow dorks! Including the one I will totally not be subjecting to Voltron spoilers via text all weekend. <3


End file.
